Embedded Picture Mnemonics to Learn Letters

Abstract

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 Ehri's (2005) partial alphabetic phase.