Gender and age influence in handwriting performance in children and adolescents

Abstract

Development of fine motor skills, especially drawing and handwriting, plays a crucial role in school performance and, more generally, in autonomy of everyday life. Moreover, a variety of neurological and psychiatric conditions in childhood and adolescence could stunt the normal motor and cognitive development [1]. In recent years, the analysis of handwriting movements, that allows objective quantitative kinematic analyses of writing quality, has been directly performed through digitizing tablets. This technology has been used to acquire and successively characterize the handwriting process [2] by measuring parameters extracted from the basic elements of writing, such as components and strokes. In order to study the normal development of some kinematic parameters of handwriting movements (such as length, duration, mean and peak velocity of components and strokes) and determine the influence of gender we examined the writing responses of two hundred and eighteen children and adolescents. Cursive writing was acquired by a digital tablet and its dynamic aspects were studied in five different experimental conditions: two repetitive sequences of le and uno, a series of numbers (in letters) in ascending order and a sentence written in two different ways. Some results show that in the first grades of Primary school, females have better performances than males. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.