Constraining Stroke Order During Manual Symbol Learning Hinders Subsequent Recognition in Children Under 4 1/2 Years

In the age of technology, writing by hand has become less common than texting and keyboarding. Learning letters by hand, however, has been shown to have profound developmental importance. One aspect of writing by hand that has been understudied is the effect of learning symbols stroke-by-stroke, a dynamic action that does not occur with keyboarding. We trained children to draw novel symbols in either an instructed stroke order or in a self-directed stroke order and tested: (1) whether learning novel symbols in a self-directed stroke order benefits subsequent recognition more than learning in a specified stroke order, (2) whether seeing novel symbols unfold in the stroke order that was taught would aid in recognition, and (3) whether any effects are age-dependent. Our results demonstrate that producing a symbol with a self-directed stroke order provides more benefit to symbol recognition than instructed stroke orders in 4.0–4.5-year-old children but not in 4.5–5.0-year-old children. We found, further, that the observed recognition benefits were not affected by seeing the symbol unfold in the same stroke order it was learned during testing, suggesting that the learning was not reliant upon the exact stroke order experienced during learning. These results stress the importance of allowing children to produce symbols in a self-directed manner and, by extension, that constraining how a child learns to write can adversely affect subsequent recognition.