Asselborn Thibault, Johal Wafa, Tleubayev Bolat, Zhexenova Zhanel, Dillenbourg Pierre, McBride Catherine, Sandygulova Anara
CHILI Lab, EPFL, Route Cantonale, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Faculty of Engineering, UNSW, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
NPJ Sci Learn. 2021 Feb 23;6(1):6. doi: 10.1038/s41539-021-00084-w.
Do handwriting skills transfer when a child writes in two different scripts, such as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets? Are our measures of handwriting skills intrinsically bound to one alphabet or will a child who faces handwriting difficulties in one script experience similar difficulties in the other script? To answer these questions, 190 children from grades 1-4 were asked to copy a short text using both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets on a digital tablet. A recent change of policy in Kazakhstan gave us an opportunity to measure transfer, as the Latin-based Kazakh alphabet has not yet been introduced. Therefore, pupils in grade 1 had a 6-months experience in Cyrillic, and pupils in grades 2, 3, and 4 had 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 years of experience in Cyrillic, respectively. This unique situation created a quasi-experimental situation that allowed us to measure the influence of the number of years spent practicing Cyrillic on the quality of handwriting in the Latin alphabet. The results showed that some of the differences between the two scripts were constant across all grades. These differences thus reflect the intrinsic differences in the handwriting dynamics between the two alphabets. For instance, several features related to the pen pressure on the tablet are quite different. Other features, however, revealed decreasing differences between the two scripts across grades. While we found that the quality of Cyrillic writing increased from grades 1-4, due to increased practice, we also found that the quality of the Latin writing increased as well, despite the fact that all of the pupils had the same absence of experience in writing in Latin. We can therefore interpret this improvement in Latin script as an indicator of the transfer of fine motor control skills from Cyrillic to Latin. This result is especially surprising given that one could instead hypothesize a negative transfer, i.e., that the finger controls automated for one alphabet would interfere with those required by the other alphabet. One interesting side-effect of these findings is that the algorithms that we developed for the diagnosis of handwriting difficulties among French-speaking children could be relevant for other alphabets, paving the way for the creation of a cross-lingual model for the detection of handwriting difficulties.
当孩子用两种不同的文字书写时，比如拉丁字母和西里尔字母，书写技能会迁移吗？我们对书写技能的衡量是本质上与一种字母表相关联，还是说在一种文字中面临书写困难的孩子在另一种文字中也会遇到类似困难？为了回答这些问题，190名一至四年级的学生被要求在电子平板电脑上用西里尔字母和拉丁字母抄写一篇短文。哈萨克斯坦最近的一项政策变化给了我们衡量迁移的机会，因为基于拉丁字母的哈萨克语字母表尚未引入。因此，一年级学生有6个月使用西里尔字母的经验，二、三、四年级学生分别有1.5年、2.5年和3.5年使用西里尔字母的经验。这种独特的情况创造了一种准实验情境，使我们能够衡量练习西里尔字母的年数对用拉丁字母书写质量的影响。结果表明，两种文字之间的一些差异在所有年级都是恒定的。因此，这些差异反映了两种字母表在书写动态方面的内在差异。例如，与平板电脑上的笔压力相关的几个特征有很大不同。然而，其他特征显示，随着年级的升高，两种文字之间的差异在减小。虽然我们发现由于练习增加，西里尔字母书写的质量从一年级到四年级有所提高，但我们也发现，尽管所有学生在书写拉丁字母方面都同样缺乏经验，但拉丁字母书写的质量也有所提高。因此，我们可以将拉丁字母书写的这种提高解释为精细运动控制技能从西里尔字母迁移到拉丁字母的一个指标。鉴于有人可能会假设存在负迁移，即一种字母表自动化的手指控制会干扰另一种字母表所需的控制，这一结果尤其令人惊讶。这些发现的一个有趣的副作用是，我们为诊断说法语儿童的书写困难而开发的算法可能适用于其他字母表，为创建一个跨语言的书写困难检测模型铺平了道路。
