A one-year survey of cursive letter handwriting in a French second-grade child with developmental coordination disorder

Abstract

We examined the evolution of cursive letter handwriting in a French girl with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) throughout the second-grade, and compared it to that of typically developing (TD) pre-schoolers (5-6 years old; N = 98), first-graders (6-7 years old; N = 85) and second-graders (7-8 years old; N = 88). Children were asked to write cursively 20 randomly-dictated letters. Each letter track was digitized, and eight kinematic parameters were measured to evaluate writing fluency. Results showed that even with remediation, the DCD child's handwriting productions evolve much less over the year than those of TD children, and remained more similar to those of pre-schoolers than to those of first- or second-graders at all stages. Moreover, the number of parameters which differed significantly between the DCD child and TD children increased over time. The most discriminative parameters were letters size and mean speed. These results again raise the question of the need for handwriting remediation in DCD children once the delay with TD children becomes too important.