A series of four experiments investigated the effects of manual tracing on visual‐verbal paired‐associate learning. In the first experiment preschool children were taught the names of letters of the alphabet; tracing the letters facilitated this learning. This effect was explored further in three experiments where older children were taught letter names paired with abstract letter‐like forms. Tracing improved the learning of the names for these forms, and this improvement seemed attributable to improvements in visual recognition of the forms produced by tracing.
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Hulme et al. (1987) studied this question.