Preschool Children’s Knowledge of Letter Patterns in Print

According to a statistical-learning view of literacy development, children begin to learn about the visual characteristics of writing from an early age. We used a delayed copying task to examine U.S. preschoolers’ knowledge about how letters combine with one another. Children (n = 77, mean age 4 years, 8 months) were shown a series of 4-letter strings for 20 seconds each and were asked to reproduce each string after it had been removed from view. Some strings, such as ‹CHED›, included relatively common combinations of letters. In other strings, such as ‹EHDC›, the letters were rearranged so that the strings looked less like English words. When we scored children’s responses for their distance from the presented items, we found better performance on the more wordlike items than the less wordlike items. The results show that preschoolers possess some knowledge about how letters combine, consistent with the statistical-learning view.