Embedded Picture Mnemonics to Learn Letters

Can embedded mnemonics ease the task of learning a foreign alphabet? English-speaking preschoolers (N = 36, M = 5;2 years) were taught 10 Hebrew letter-sound relations. Experimental letters were learned with mnemonics that embedded letter shapes in drawings of objects whose shapes resembled the letters and whose English names began with the letters' sounds (e.g., , desk, /d/). Control letters were learned with the same objects but depicted unlike letter shapes. Children learned to segment initial sounds in words. Then they learned each letter set to criterion in a counterbalanced, repeated measures design. Embedded letters were mastered in fewer trials, were less frequently confused with other letters, were remembered better 1 week later, and facilitated performance in word reading and spelling transfer tasks compared to control letters. We suggest that embedded mnemonics better secured letters to their sounds in memory which in turn improved word learning for children in CitationEhri's (2005) partial alphabetic phase. Notes aPercentage of children who performed perfectly during the first test trial. All children performed perfectly during the second trial. aEffect size was calculated by subtracting the mean in the disassociated mnemonic condition from the mean in the embedded mnemonic condition and dividing the difference by the pooled standard deviation. bScores indicate the mean number of trials needed to learn to read the words once perfectly, so lower scores reflect better performance. cIn Word Recognition A, the child viewed two written words and pointed to the one spoken by the examiner. In Word Recognition B, the child heard two spoken words and repeated the spoken word that matched the written word shown on a card. *p < .05. **p < .01. df = 35 on the posttests and 23 on the review and transfer tasks.