Abstract
Parents and teachers worldwide believe that a visual environment rich with print can contribute to young children's literacy. Children seem to recognize words in familiar logos at an early age. However, most of previous studies were carried out with alphabetic scripts. Alphabetic letters regularly correspond to phonological segments in a word and provide strong cues about the identity of the whole word. Thus it was not clear whether children can learn to read words by extracting visual word form information from environmental prints. To exclude the phonological-cue confound, this study tested children's knowledge of Chinese words embedded in familiar logos. The four environmental logos were employed and transformed into four versions with the contextual cues (i.e., something apart from the presentation of the words themselves in logo format like the color, logo and font type cues) gradually minimized. Children aged from 3 to 5 were tested. We observed that children of different ages all performed better when words were presented in highly familiar logos compared to when they were presented in a plain fashion, devoid of context. This advantage for familiar logos was also present when the contextual information was only partial. However, the role of various cues in learning words changed with age. The color and logo cues had a larger effect in 3- and 4- year-olds than in 5-year-olds, while the font type cue played a greater role in 5-year-olds than in the other two groups. Our findings demonstrated that young children did not easily learn words by extracting their visual form information even from familiar environmental prints. However, children aged 5 begin to pay more attention to the visual form information of words in highly familiar logos than those aged 3 and 4.
Highlights
A vast amount of research in the past decades has shown that early literacy experience and preliteracy knowledge can predict later literacy outcomes [1,2,3,4]
We found that children aged 3 to 5 all performed better when words were presented in highly familiar logos compared to when they were presented in a plain fashion, devoid of context
This advantage for familiar logos was present when the contextual information was only partial. These findings suggested that children read words in logos depending on contextual cues and verified our second hypothesis
Summary
A vast amount of research in the past decades has shown that early literacy experience and preliteracy knowledge can predict later literacy outcomes [1,2,3,4]. It is possible that children have learned the letters elsewhere and applied them to guess correctly the identity of some of words in familiar logos If this was the case, it would be questionable as to whether previous findings suggested that young children have extracted visual word form information directly from environmental prints. To control for this major confound, one needs to use word scripts without direct grapheme to phoneme mapping such that children cannot use the sound gleaned from part of the word to guess its identity. If the role of various cues changes with age, different aged children would perform differently when these cues are removed
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