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Abstract Background Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we aimed to investigate audiovisual integration neural mechanisms during a letter identification task in the left and right sides. Unimodal (A,V) and bimodal (AV) stimuli were presented on either side, with ERPs from unimodal (A,V) stimuli on the same side being compared to those from simultaneous bimodal stimuli (AV). Non-zero results of the AV-(A + V) difference waveforms indicated audiovisual integration on the left/right side. Results When spatially coherent AV stimuli were presented on the right side, two significant ERP components in the integrated differential wave were noted. The N134 and N262, present in the first 300 ms of the AV-(A + V) integration difference wave, indicated significant audiovisual integration effects. However, when these stimuli were presented on the left side, there were no significant integration components. This audiovisual integration difference may stem from left/right asymmetry of cerebral hemisphere language processing. Conclusions Audiovisual letter information presented on the right side was easier to integrate, process, and represent. Additionally, only one significant integrative component peaked at 140 ms in the parietal cortex for spatially non-coherent AV stimuli and provided audiovisual multisensory integration, which could be attributed to some integrative neural processes that depend on the spatial congruity of the auditory and visual stimuli.

Impairments of object recognition are core features of neurodegenerative syndromes, in particular posterior cortical atrophy (PCA; the 'visual-variant Alzheimer's disease'). These impairments arise from damage to higher-level cortical visual regions and are often missed or misattributed to common ophthalmological conditions. Consequently, diagnosis can be delayed for years with considerable implications for patients. We report a new test for the rapid measurement of cortical visual loss – the Graded Incomplete Letters Test (GILT). The GILT is an optimised psychophysical variation of a test used to diagnose cortical visual impairment, which measures thresholds for recognising letters under levels of increasing visual degradation (decreasing "completeness") in a similar fashion to ophthalmic tests. The GILT was administered to UK Biobank participants (total n=2,359) and participants with neurodegenerative conditions characterised by initial cortical visual (PCA, n=18) or memory loss (typical Alzheimer's disease, n=9). UK Biobank participants, including both typical adults and those with ophthalmological conditions, were able to recognise letters under low levels of completeness. In contrast, participants with PCA consistently made errors with only modest decreases in completeness. GILT sensitivity to PCA was 83.3% for participants reaching the 80% accuracy cut-off, increasing to 88.9% using alternative cut-offs (60% or 100% accuracy). Specificity values were consistently over 94% when compared to UK Biobank participants without or with documented visual conditions, regardless of accuracy cut-off. These first-release UK Biobank and clinical verification data suggest the GILT has utility in both rapidly detecting visual perceptual losses following posterior cortical damage and differentiating perceptual losses from common eye-related conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we aimed to investigate audiovisual integration neural mechanisms during a letter identification task in the left and right sides. Unimodal (A,V) and bimodal (AV) stimuli were presented on either side, with ERPs from unimodal (A,V) stimuli on the same side being compared to those from simultaneous bimodal stimuli (AV). Non-zero results of the AV-(A + V) difference waveforms indicated audiovisual integration on the left/right side. Results: When spatially coherent AV stimuli were presented on the right side, two significant ERP components in the integrated differential wave were noted. The N134 and N262, present in the first 300 ms of the AV-(A + V) integration difference wave, indicated significant audiovisual integration effects. However, when these stimuli were presented on the left side, there were no significant integration components. This audiovisual integration difference may stem from left/right asymmetry of cerebral hemisphere language processing. Conclusions: Audiovisual letter information presented on the right side was easier to integrate, process, and represent. Additionally, only one significant integrative component peaked at 140 ms in the parietal cortex for spatially non-coherent AV stimuli and provided audiovisual multisensory integration, which could be attributed to some integrative neural processes that depend on the spatial congruity of the auditory and visual stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work has shown that letters presented in special fonts with a high degree of script style have a poor recognition rate. We investigated whether there is a breaking point where this deficit sets in. In an experimental paradigm using a three-letter string partial report, 32 participants were presented with test stimuli of four new fonts with gradually increasing script style. The results of our investigation showed that each level of increasing script style resulted in significantly worse recognition. These findings demonstrate that for maximum letter recognition, the font style should be based on simple and familiar letter skeletons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to better understand how the use of smartboard media supports letter recognition ability in students with Cerebral Palsy at Lutang State Special School. Data was collected using a questionnaire and an efficacy assessment. Among them are the Lutang State Special School instructor and two examiners. This study describes the development of 4D models: definition, design, development, and dissemination. Quantitative descriptive analysis was carried out on the collected data. The result of the media research validation test for smartboards shows that handwriting recognition in students with Cerebral Palsy is feasible and can be learned.

Binocular summation, a well-known phenomenon in letter acuity measurement, refers to the improvement in visual performance when viewing with both eyes compared to one eye alone. The present study aims to assess the relationship in binocular summation between high and low contrast letter acuities, and examine whether baseline measure (binocular summation at either high or low contrast) is predictive of the change in binocular summation between contrast conditions. Corrected high and low contrast letter acuities were assessed monocularly and binocularly in 358 normal vision observers aged 18-37 years using Bailey- Lovie charts. All observers had high contrast acuities (both monocular and binocular) of 0.1 LogMAR or better and no known eye disease. Binocular summation was calculated as the difference in LogMAR between the better eye acuity and binocular acuity. We found that binocular summation was present at both contrast levels (0.044 = 0.002 LogMAR for high and 0.069 = 0.002 LogMAR for low contrast) with higher magnitude of summation at low contrast, and declined with increasing interocular difference. There was a correlation in binocular summation between high and low contrast. The difference in binocular summation between the two contrast levels was found to be correlated with the baseline measurement. Using common commercially available letter acuity charts, we replicated the findings on binocular acuity summation in normally sighted young adults for both high and low contrast letters. Our study revealed a positive relationship in binocular acuity summation between high and low contrast, and an association between a baseline measure and the change in binocular summation between contrast levels. These findings may serve as a reference in clinical practice and research when high and low contrast binocular summations are measured in assessing binocular functional vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many models posit the use of distinctive spatial features to recognize letters of the alphabet, a fundamental component of reading. It has also been hypothesized that when letters are in close proximity, visual crowding may cause features to mislocalize between nearby letters, causing identification errors. Here, we took a data-driven approach to investigate these aspects of textual processing. Using data collected from subjects identifying each letter in thousands of lower-case letter trigrams presented in the peripheral visual field, we found characteristic error patterns in the results suggestive of the use of particular spatial features. Distinctive features were seldom entirely missed, and we found evidence for errors due to doubling, masking, and migration of features. Dependencies both amongst neighboring letters and in the responses revealed the contingent nature of processing letter strings, challenging the most basic models of reading that ignore either crowding or featural decomposition.

Handwriting (HW) training seems to boost recognition of visual graphs and learning to read more than other learning experiences. However, effects across studies appear to be variable and the underlying cognitive mechanism has been elusive. We thus conducted a meta-analysis on 50 independent experiments (with 1525 participants) to determine the magnitude of this HW benefit in visual graph recognition, while enlightening the underlying cognitive mechanism, by investigating four types of moderators: training program (type of control training, presence/absence of phonological training, and HW tasks adopted); set size and training regime (duration and frequency of session and total amount of training); granularity of visual discrimination and perceptual learning tasks; and age of participants. The benefit from HW training was moderate-to-large and significant (Hedge's g = 0.58, SE =.09) and was also modulated by the type of control training (larger relative to motor, g = 0.78, than to visual control, g = 0.37), phonological training (larger when it was absent, g = 0.79, than present, g = 0.47), and granularity of visual discrimination (larger for fine-grained, g = 0.93, than coarse-grained, g = 0.19). These results seem consistent with symbolic accounts that hold that the advantage from HW training in visual graph recognition is about perceptual learning rather than the motor act. Multiple meta-regressions also revealed that training regime moderated the HW benefit. We conclude that HW training is effective to improve visual graph recognition, and hence is still relevant for literacy instruction in the present digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Letter identification in words was unaffected by crowding. • Crowding was strong in non-words. • Accuracy of letter identification for words was 15% better than for non-words. • Word-based guessing was ruled out as it only accounted for 2% of this advantage. Crowding and the word superiority effect are two perceptual phenomena that influence reading. The identification of the inner letters of a word can be hindered by crowding from adjacent letters, but it can be facilitated by the word context itself (the word superiority effect). In the present study, strings of four-letters (words and non-words) with different inter-letter spacings (ranging from an optimal spacing to produce crowding to a spacing too large to produce crowding) were presented briefly in the periphery and participants were asked to identify the third letter of the string. Each word had a partner word that was identical except for its third letter (e.g., COLD, CORD) so that guessing as the source of the improved performance for words could be ruled out. Unsurprisingly, letter identification accuracy for words was better than non-words. For non-words, it was lowest at closer spacings, confirming crowding. However, for words, accuracy remained high at all inter-letter spacings showing that crowding did not prevent identification of the inner letters. This result supports models of "holistic" word recognition where partial cues can lead to recognition without first identifying individual letters. Once the word is recognized, its inner letters can be recovered, despite their feature loss produced by crowding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gestalt principles of perceptual learning elucidate how the human brain categorizes and comprehends a set of visual elements grouped together. One of the principles of Gestalt perceptual learning is the law of closure which propounds that human perception has the proclivity to visualize a fragmented object as a preknown whole by bridging the missing gaps. Herein, a letter recognition scheme emulating the Gestalt closure principle is demonstrated, utilizing artificial synapses made of 3D integrated MA3Bi2I9 (MBI) perovskite nanowire (NW) array. The artificial synapses exhibit short‐term plasticity (STP) and long‐term potentiation (LTP) and a transition from STP to LTP with increasing number of input electrical pulses. Initiatory ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations attribute the conductance change in the MBI NW artificial synapses to the rotation of MA+ clusters, culminating in charge exchange between MA+ and Bi2I93−. Each device yields 40 conductance states with excellent retention >105 s, minimal variation (2σ/mean) <10%, and endurance of ≈105 cycles. MBI NW‐based artificial neural network (ANN) is constructed to recognize fragmented letters alike their distinction in unabridged form and also the gradual withering of synaptic connectivity with engendered missing fragments is demonstrated, thereby successfully implementing Gestalt closure principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most text on modern electronic displays is set in fonts of regular letter width. Little is known about whether this is the optimal font width for letter recognition. We tested three variants of the font family Helvetica Neue (Condensed, Standard, and Extended). We ran two separate experiments at different distances and different retinal locations. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were presented in the parafovea at 2° eccentricity; in Experiment 2, the stimuli were presented in the periphery at 9° eccentricity. In both experiments, we employed a short-exposure single-report trigram paradigm in which a string of three letters was presented left or right off-centre. Participants were instructed to report the middle letter while maintaining fixation on the fixation cross. Wider fonts resulted in better recognition and fewer misreadings for neighbouring letters than narrower fonts, which demonstrated that wider letter shapes improve recognition at glance reading in the peripheral visual view. Practitioner summary: Most of the text is set in fonts of regular letter width. In two single-target trigram letter recognition experiments, we showed that wider letter shapes facilitate better recognition than narrower letter shapes. This indicates that when letter identification is a priority, it is beneficial to choose fonts of wider letter shapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes the implementation of language learning in children aged 4-5 years in TK ABA JOGOKARYAN while studying at home. The assessed research was to describe the implementation of letter recognition in children aged 4-5 years at TK ABA Jogokaryan. This research is a qualitative approach and descriptive research type. The subjects of this study were the principal, class A teachers, parents of class A students, and grade A children. The object of this study was the implementation of letter recognition in children aged 4-5 years at TK ABA JOGOKARYAN in class A2 while studying at home. The data collection techniques used were interviews and documentation. The data analysis technique uses the theory of Miles and Huberman, namely data collection, data condensation, data presentation, and concluding. The validity of the research data was re-tested using source triangulation and method triangulation. The results of this study indicate: 1) Planning begins with making daily lesson plans, then sent to parents via Whatsapp group or give to parents directly when they come to school. 2) The implementation of letter recognition is played by parents by accompanying and documenting the learning activity process. 3) Evaluation is carried out through documentation reported by parents on the Whatsapp group. 4) Supporting factors include guidance from parents in letter recognition while children are studying at home, online media, which is used as a communication tool for teachers and parents, and special programs on television that help children's learning while at home. At the same time, the inhibiting factors are some families who do not make it a habit knowing letters, parents' busyness, mood swings, and a lack of enthusiasm for learning.

The Gestalt principles of perceptual learning elucidate how the human brain categorizes and comprehends a set of visual elements grouped together. One of the principles of Gestalt perceptual learning is the law of closure which propounds that human perception has the proclivity to visualize a fragmented object as a preknown whole by bridging the missing gaps. Herein, a letter recognition scheme emulating the Gestalt closure principle is demonstrated, utilizing artificial synapses made of 3D integrated MA3Bi2I9 (MBI) perovskite nanowire (NW) array. The artificial synapses exhibit short‐term plasticity (STP) and long‐term potentiation (LTP) and a transition from STP to LTP with increasing number of input electrical pulses. Initiatory ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations attribute the conductance change in the MBI NW artificial synapses to the rotation of MA+ clusters, culminating in charge exchange between MA+ and Bi2I93−. Each device yields 40 conductance states with excellent retention >105 s, minimal variation (2σ/mean)

Letter recognition is the first stage in developing children's reading skills. It is hence important to optimize the stimulus for letter recognition, either in terms of methods or media. One of the media helpful for improving children's letter recognition is the alphabet book. The present study aims to depict the role of the alphabet book in improving preschool children's letter recognition. This qualitative library research garnered articles and books using two keywords: alphabet book and letter recognition. The data were collected using documentation and analyzed using Miles and Huberman's descriptive analysis. The result showed that Alphabet Book improved children's letter recognition. Alphabet book could improve children's ability to recognize letter shapes and sounds and write the letter. This improvement appears to be accounted for by the book's various themes, attractive illustrations, and words representing each letter. The alphabet book is also interesting when used together with storytelling and play methods. Alphabet book also plays a role in improving children's learning interest and enriching their vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on evidence that learning new characters through handwriting leads to better recognition than learning through typing, some authors proposed that the graphic motor plans acquired through handwriting contribute to recognition. More recently two alternative explanations have been put forward. First, the advantage of handwriting could be due to the perceptual variability that it provides during learning. Second, a recent study suggests that detailed visual analysis might be the source of the advantage of handwriting over typing. Indeed, in that study, handwriting and composition –a method requiring a detailed visual analysis but no specific graphomotor activity– led to equivalent recognition accuracy, both higher than typing. The aim of the present study was to assess whether the contribution of detailed visual analysis is observed in preschool children and to test the variability hypothesis. To that purpose, three groups of preschool children learned new symbols either by handwriting, typing, or composition. After learning, children performed first a four-alternative recognition task and then a categorization task. The same pattern of results as the one observed in adults emerged in the four-alternative recognition task, confirming the importance of the detailed visual analysis in letter-like shape learning. In addition, results failed to reveal any difference across learning methods in the categorization task. The latter results provide no evidence for the variability hypothesis which would predict better categorization after handwriting than after typing or composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on evidence that learning new characters through handwriting leads to better recognition than learning through typing, some authors proposed that the graphic motor plans acquired through handwriting contribute to recognition. More recently two alternative explanations have been put forward. First, the advantage of handwriting could be due to the perceptual variability that it provides during learning. Second, a recent study suggests that detailed visual analysis might be the source of the advantage of handwriting over typing. Indeed, in that study, handwriting and composition –a method requiring a detailed visual analysis but no specific graphomotor activity– led to equivalent recognition accuracy, both higher than typing. The aim of the present study was to assess whether the contribution of detailed visual analysis is observed in preschool children and to test the variability hypothesis. To that purpose, three groups of preschool children learned new symbols either by handwriting, typing, or composition. After learning, children performed first a four-alternative recognition task and then a categorization task. The same pattern of results as the one observed in adults emerged in the four-alternative recognition task, confirming the importance of the detailed visual analysis in letter-like shape learning. In addition, results failed to reveal any difference across learning methods in the categorization task. The latter results provide no evidence for the variability hypothesis which would predict better categorization after handwriting than after typing or composition.

As one of the most important ways of human-machine interfaces, the touchpad has excellent input convenience. Input devices for extreme environments require simpler structures and diverse inputs to ensure information inputs. This paper proposed a self-powered flexible input panel with single-channel output for the input recognition of all 26 letters, and a paper mask was implemented to cover the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) board and obtain more complicated electrical signal features. Based on the change of the triboelectric output of the mask, neural network models with different combinations of layers were designed and optimized, and the highest recognition rate of 88.7% for all letters and 100% recognition accuracy for some letters were achieved among the five testers. For letters with low recognition rates, a specific writing specification was further proposed to improve the accuracy of model recognition. These results facilitate the application of the proposed input panel as a flexible wearable device and personal protective equipment for extreme environments including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear (CBRN) scenarios or aerospace.

Convolutional neural networks have provided state‐of‐the‐art solutions for many subfields of computer vision. While there exist many studies in the literature for several languages, studies for handwritten Turkish character recognition lack in the research field. To this end, we propose a novel handwritten Turkish letter recognition model based on a convolutional neural network. Since, to the best of our knowledge, there do not exist any publicly available handwritten Turkish letters datasets, we constructed a handwritten Turkish letters dataset that consists of 25,875 samples. To compare the performance of the proposed model with the related work, three state‐of‐the‐art models, namely, VGG19, InceptionV3, and Xception, were utilized through the transfer learning technique. When these models were evaluated on the handwritten Turkish letter dataset, the proposed model's accuracy was calculated as high as 96.07% which was higher than the benchmark models. To measure the generalization ability of the proposed model, it was evaluated on a gold standard dataset, namely, EMNIST, and has achieved an accuracy of 80.54% which was higher than the benchmark models. Finally, the proposed model was trained and evaluated on the EMNIST dataset and it has achieved an accuracy of 94.61% which outperformed the related work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machines are becoming indispensable in our lives and the requirements of the human-machine interactions are increasing. Conventional devices, such as a keyboard or touch screen, may not be preferred in future’s entertainment, home, and industrial applications. Device-free (non-contact) solutions will be even more popular. These solutions often use visual and acoustic technologies which have some disadvantages. The use of radio frequency (RF) waves for human-machine interaction such as air-writing (Wri), is a new and challenging problem. We propose a device-free machine learning-based air-writing recognition framework called RF-Wri which can effectively distinguish 26 capital letters. Two-channel low-cost software-defined radios (SDR) and oppositely polarized antennas are used to provide polarization diversity which makes the accuracy of classification superior. Another critical novelty is the usage of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients as new features to represent RF waveform which provides writing speed and user invariant recognition. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) filters and letter segmentation algorithm are used for signal de-noising and separating the air-writing activities, respectively. It is shown that Support Vector Machine (SVM) can successfully classify the measured RF waves of air-written letters. It is verified with various real measurements that the proposed framework, RF-Wri, achieves 95.15% accuracy in the classification of all 26 air-written letters and outperforms the fairly new WiFi-based air-writing recognition approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on observations, the researcher found that letter recognition for K3 students at ABC school Manado in their Bahasa Indonesia lessons was low. Students' understanding of letters had not reached the 75% standard assessment given by the teacher. To overcome the problem, the researcher implemented the use of pictures as a media to increase K3 students’ letter recognition. The method used in this research was Classroom Action Research (CAR) using Kemmis and McTaggart model through two cycles. The research was conducted between October 4 and November 3, 2017, using 18 students. The research instruments used to collect the data were the researcher’s observation checklist, the mentor’s observation checklist, another teacher’s observation checklist, students’ worksheets, and an interview with the mentor. Research findings indicated an increase of K3 students’ letter recognition in their Bahasa Indonesia lessons at ABC School Manado with the indicator of achievement of letter recognition reaching 100% and the indicator of letter sound recognition also reaching 100%. The steps of using the drawing media during learning were also consistently performed by showing 100% assessment results through observations by mentors and peers. Therefore, it can be concluded that the use of pictures as a media can increase K3 students’ letter recognition in Bahasa Indonesia lessons at ABC School Manado. BAHASA INDONESIA ABSTRAK: Berdasarkan hasil observasi ditemukan bahwa pengenalan huruf pada siswa K3 pada sekolah swasta di Manado pada mata pelajaran bahasa Indonesia masih rendah, yaitu ditunjukkan dengan pemahaman terhadap huruf belum mencapai angka 75% standar penilaian yang diberikan oleh guru. Adapun tujuan penelitian ini adalah menerapkan penggunaan media gambar untuk meningkatkan pengenalan huruf siswa K3. Desain penelitian yang digunakan adalah penelitian tindakan kelas (PTK) model Kemmis dan Taggart melalui dua siklus. Penelitian dilaksanakan pada tanggal 4 Oktober sampai dengan 3 November 2017 terhadap 18 siswa di Sekolah ABC Manado. Instrumen yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah lembar observasi ceklispeneliti, lembar ceklismentor, lembar observasi ceklisrekan sejawat, lembar kerja siswa, dan lembar wawancara mentor. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan peningkatan pada pengenalan huruf siswa kelas K3-A Sekolah ABC Manado pada mata pelajaran bahasa Indonesia dengan pencapaian kriteria indikator mengenal huruf adalah 100%, indikator pengenalan bunyi huruf adalah 100%. Langkah-langkah penggunaan media gambar pada saat pembelajaran juga konsisten dilakukan dengan menunjukkan hasil penilaian 100% melalui observasi dari mentor dan rekan sejawat. Dengan demikian dapat disimpulkan bahwa penggunaan media gambar dapat meningkatkan pengenalan huruf siswa K3-A di sekolah ABC Manado dalam mata pelajaran bahasa Indonesia.

Recent evidence suggests a double dissociation of size and spacing limit on letter recognition-it is limited by size in the fovea and critical spacing in the normal periphery. Here, we evaluated whether size or spacing limits letter recognition in people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) who must use their peripheral vision. We measured the size threshold for recognizing lowercase letters presented alone, or flanked by two letters at various center-to-center nominal letter spacings (multiples of letter size) for 11 observers with AMD. For comparison, similar measurements were obtained at 5° and 10° eccentricity in the nasal and lower visual fields in three older adults with normal vision. Single-letter size thresholds were worse for observers with AMD than at comparable retinal locations in the normal periphery. For flanked letters, size threshold improved with larger nominal spacing up to the critical spacing, beyond which size threshold was unaffected by the flankers. Seven AMD observers had a nominal critical spacing between 1.25× and 1.80×, values close to those in the normal fovea, suggesting that their letter recognition is size-limited; two had a nominal critical spacing of 3-4×, values close to those in the normal periphery, implying that their letter recognition is limited by spacing; and another two had a nominal critical spacing of ∼2.3×, implying that their letter recognition is limited by both size and spacing. The wide range of nominal critical spacings observed in our AMD observers may reflect the degree of completeness of their adaptation process to vision loss.

In a previous study, Chung, Legge, and Cheung (2004) showed that training using repeated presentation of trigrams (sequences of three random letters) resulted in an increase in the size of the visual span (number of letters recognized in a glance) and reading speed in the normal periphery. In this study, we asked whether we could optimize the benefit of trigram training on reading speed by using trigrams more specific to the reading task (i.e., trigrams frequently used in the English language) and presenting them according to their frequencies of occurrence in normal English usage and observers' performance. Averaged across seven observers, our training paradigm (4 days of training) increased the size of the visual span by 6.44 bits, with an accompanied 63.6% increase in the maximum reading speed, compared with the values before training. However, these benefits were not statistically different from those of Chung, Legge, and Cheung (2004) using a random-trigram training paradigm. Our findings confirm the possibility of increasing the size of the visual span and reading speed in the normal periphery with perceptual learning, and suggest that the benefits of training on letter recognition and maximum reading speed may not be linked to the types of letter strings presented during training.

We examined the effects of the spatial complexity of flankers and target-flanker similarity on the performance of identifying crowded letters. On each trial, observers identified the middle character of random strings of three characters ("trigrams") briefly presented at 10° below fixation. We tested the 26 lowercase letters of the Times Roman and Courier fonts, a set of 79 characters (letters and non-letters) of the Times Roman font, and the uppercase letters of two highly complex ornamental fonts, Edwardian and Aristocrat. Spatial complexity of characters was quantified by the length of the morphological skeleton of each character, and target-flanker similarity was defined based on a psychometric similarity matrix. Our results showed that (1) letter identification error rate increases with flanker complexity up to a certain value, beyond which error rate becomes independent of flanker complexity; (2) the increase of error rate is slower for high-complexity target letters; (3) error rate increases with target-flanker similarity; and (4) mislocation error rate increases with target-flanker similarity. These findings, combined with the current understanding of the faulty feature integration account of crowding, provide some constraints of how the feature integration process could cause perceptual errors.

It is not known how effective specific types of motor-enriched activities are at improving academic learning and early reading skills in children. The aim of this study was to investigate whether fine or gross motor enrichment during a single session of recognizing letters “b”/“d” can improve within-session performance or delayed retention the following day in comparison to letter recognition practice without movement. Furthermore, the aim was to investigate children’s motivation to perform the specific tasks. We used a randomized controlled intervention study-design to investigate the effect of 10-min motor-enriched “b”/“d” letter training on children’s ability to recognize the letters “b” and “d” (n = 127, mean age = 7.61 ± SD = 0.44 years) acutely, and in a delayed retention test. Three groups were included: a fine motor-enriched group (FME), a gross motor-enriched group (GME), that received 10 min of “b” and “d” training with enriched gestures (fine or gross motor movements, respectively), and a control group (CON), which received non motor-enriched “b”/“d” training. The children’s ability to recognize “b” and “d” were tested before (T0), immediately after (T1), and one day after the intervention (T2) using a “b”/“d” Recognition Test. Based on a generalized linear mixed model a significant group-time interaction was found for accuracy in the “b”/“d” Recognition Test. Specifically, FME improved their ability to recognize “b”/“d” at post intervention (T0→T1, p = 0.008) and one-day retention test (T0→T2, p < 0.001) more than CON. There was no significant difference in change between GME and CON. For reaction time there were no significant global interaction effects observed. However, planned post hoc comparisons revealed a significant difference between GME and CON immediately after the intervention (T0→T1, p = 0.03). The children’s motivation-score was higher for FME and GME compared to CON (FME-CON: p = 0.01; GME-CON: p = 0.01). The study demonstrated that fine motor-enriched training improved children’s letter recognition more than non motor activities. Both types of motor training were accompanied by higher intrinsic motivation for the children compared to the non motor training group. The study suggests a new method for motor-enriched letter learning and future research should investigate the underlying mechanisms.

Previous research has reported that both letter and word identification are slower when the stimuli are presented at rotations above 45° than when presented in their canonical horizontal view. Indeed, influential models of word recognition posit that letter detectors in the visual word recognition system are disrupted by rotation angles above 40° or 45° (e.g., Local Combinations Detector model; Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences). However, recent experiments have shown robust masked identity/form priming effects for 90° rotated words, thus calling into question this assumption. Here we aimed to isolate the degree to which letter detectors are disrupted when manipulating letter rotation in three masked identity priming letter match experiments. Probes and targets were always presented in the canonical upright position, whereas forwardly masked primes were rotated in different angles. The rotation angles were 0° versus 45° (Experiment 1), 22.5° versus 67.5° (Experiment 2), and 45° versus 90° (Experiment 3). Results showed a sizeable masked identity priming effect regardless of the rotation angle, hence demonstrating that letter detectors are not disrupted by rotations smaller than 90° in the early moments of letter processing. This pattern suggests that letter detectors are more resilient to changes in visual form than predicted by the LCD model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not known how effective specific types of motor-enriched activities are at improving academic learning and early reading skills in children. The aim of this study was to investigate whether fine or gross motor enrichment during a single session of recognizing letters "b"/"d" can improve within-session performance or delayed retention the following day in comparison to letter recognition practice without movement. Furthermore, the aim was to investigate children's motivation to perform the specific tasks. We used a randomized controlled intervention study-design to investigate the effect of 10-min motor-enriched "b"/"d" letter training on children's ability to recognize the letters "b" and "d" (n = 127, mean age = 7.61 ± SD = 0.44 years) acutely, and in a delayed retention test. Three groups were included: a fine motor-enriched group (FME), a gross motor-enriched group (GME), that received 10 min of "b" and "d" training with enriched gestures (fine or gross motor movements, respectively), and a control group (CON), which received non motor-enriched "b"/"d" training. The children's ability to recognize "b" and "d" were tested before (T0), immediately after (T1), and one day after the intervention (T2) using a "b"/"d" Recognition Test. Based on a generalized linear mixed model a significant group-time interaction was found for accuracy in the "b"/"d" Recognition Test. Specifically, FME improved their ability to recognize "b"/"d" at post intervention (T0→T1, p = 0.008) and one-day retention test (T0→T2, p < 0.001) more than CON. There was no significant difference in change between GME and CON. For reaction time there were no significant global interaction effects observed. However, planned post hoc comparisons revealed a significant difference between GME and CON immediately after the intervention (T0→T1, p = 0.03). The children's motivation-score was higher for FME and GME compared to CON (FME-CON: p = 0.01; GME-CON: p = 0.01). The study demonstrated that fine motor-enriched training improved children's letter recognition more than non motor activities. Both types of motor training were accompanied by higher intrinsic motivation for the children compared to the non motor training group. The study suggests a new method for motor-enriched letter learning and future research should investigate the underlying mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between the amount of time that preschool children, aged 6–7 years, spend using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes, aspects of their home literacy environment (HLE), and their letter recognition ability. Participants in the study were a convenient sample of 97 children (43 girls) aged 6–7 years and one of their parents, who agreed to participate in the research during the process of school readiness assessment. Children completed a letter recognition test, while parents filled out a questionnaire in which they gave estimates of the amount of time their child typically spends using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes during a typical week and completed a scale assessing their HLE. The results show that a smaller amount of time that children spend using a tablet or a smartphone for entertainment purposes during a typical week, higher education level of mothers, and more frequent parental engagement in interactive reading with children are positively related to children's letter recognition. However, more frequent interactive reading with the child was the only significant predictor of better letter recognition. The findings point to the importance of time spent using digital devices for entertainment purposes by preschool children, as well as the quality of their home environment, in literacy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our senses perceive the world, but what happens if one of the senses is degraded through illness or injury? In such situations, the brain compensates by enhancing the remaining senses. This suggests that networks that process the data received by the senses are coupled. Similar situations can occur in scientific and engineering problems when independent measurement methods, based on different principles, are used to study the same characteristics of a system. In such situation, one can develop reliable artificial neural network (ANN) based models; each trained using data obtained by a different measurement method. This raises the question if it is possible to couple these different models to obtain and improved more accurate model. In this paper, we explore this possibility by training two ANN models that can recognize alphabet letters in a noisy environment. The performance of these ANNs are optimized by varying the number of hidden neurons (HN). The first ANN model trained using pictorial presentation of the letters while the second by corresponding audio signals. The two separate ANNs are trained using the two alphabet letters presentation to which different levels of white noise are added. Different schemes to couple the two systems are examined. For some coupling schemes, the combined system result in highly improved letter recognition than the two original separate ANNs did. Examination of the entropy related to the number of HNs showed that increased entropy is related to a higher error in letter recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's ability to write letters automatically has been linked to academic achievement. Despite the importance of handwriting, handwriting instruction is often neglected and teachers use inconsistent practices to teach handwriting. Specifically, the frequency that children are presented opportunities to write individual block letters in handwriting workbooks has not been studied. Here, we provide the first case-sensitive letter frequency norms of handwriting workbooks for the English alphabet. We created these case-sensitive letter frequency norms by analyzing a corpus of 11 handwriting workbooks containing 31,164 letter requests. The results suggest that children's handwriting workbooks may not be optimally designed to promote letter writing automaticity across the letters of the English alphabet. In particular, we found that not all letters are represented equally in workbooks (p <.001). Lowercase letters (n = 24,899) were more prevalent than uppercase letters (n = 6265) and varied by letter. Furthermore, children's opportunities for writing letters in workbooks were related to letter frequencies in children's picture books (.938 for lowercase,.638 for uppercase). The fact that a letter occurs less frequently than another one in the English language, however, does not mean that the development of automaticity in writing that letter is any less important. By not providing children with roughly equivalent amounts of practice with all letters of the alphabet, designers of children's handwriting workbooks may have inadvertently provided children with too little practice with low frequency letters. Future research should more directly address how letter frequency influences the development of handwriting automaticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research the proposes a method of recognition of BISINDO letters based on hand-shape features that hint every shape of BISINDO Letters. In outline, this method is divided into two parts: the first is part of formation database shape features of BISINDO letters A-Z and the second is part of BISINDO letters recognition. In the first section consist of hand-shape image acquisition that hint every BISINDO letters, segmentation process, edge detection process, feature extraction process that is probability value of hand-shape chain code occurrence and process of database feature formation. In the second section is consist of hand-shape image acquisition process as BISINDO letters query followed by segmentation process, edge detection process, hand-shape feature extraction and recognition process by using calculation difference in distance between query shape feature to each shape feature in database feature. The image acquisition process in two parts above conducted directly (real time) via Webcam connected to the computer device. The method above has been implemented into prototype of Bisindo letters recognition software interface. The experiment results show the accuracy level of BISINDO letter recognition (26 BISINDO letters A to Z) which is reaching above 95%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning letters is an important area of language learning, conducive to the beginning of reading and writing. Indeed, today's generation prefers to learn through digital games rather than through formal teaching processes. Inspired by this need, the researcher designed this study (a) to test the effectiveness of an instructional digital game, "Kes Sesi," designed to teach letter recognition skills and (b) to briefly present its instructional development process, which was based on the ADDIE model. This was a quasi‐experimental study with two treatment groups and a control group involving 87 kindergarteners. Treatment groups played the game for 12–6 weeks for learning, 6 weeks for practice. The control group continued with its regular class activities. One treatment group played the game based on predefined sound categorization, the other without any categorization. A test on children's sound recognition abilities was administered three times as a pretest, a midtest, and a posttest. The treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group. The game enhanced the kindergarteners' ability to practice uncategorized content while it enhanced their ability to learn categorized content. The results are promising in that Kes Sesi can be useful in self‐supported learning contexts with little adult input and with minimum outside interference. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: Learning letters is an important area of language learning, conducive to the beginning of reading and writing.There is a variety of research studies on digital games for learning in the literature.It is a challenge to teach preschool children letters. What this paper adds: There seems to be a gap when it comes to experiments on kindergarteners' early reading skills.Although there are many relevant games in the market, there are no studies investigating kindergarteners' sound recognition skills through game playing on mobile technology.This study has its unique feature in terms of providing a sample article on "Design, development and application of learning tools and systems," which is a topic within the Journal's scope. Implications for practice and/or policy: Digital educational games such as "Kes Sesi" can be useful in self‐supported learning circumstances with little adult input or intervention.Similar educational games can be designed by taking the current research study as an example, and it is believed that it will encourage production of many similar games.Students' performances reach an optimal level when educational games are used after the teacher helps them construct their learning and guide them in this endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many models posit the use of distinctive spatial features to recognize letters of the alphabet, a fundamental component of reading. It has also been hypothesized that when letters are in close proximity, visual crowding may cause features to mislocalize between nearby letters, causing identification errors. Here, we took a data-driven approach to investigate these aspects of textual processing. Using data collected from subjects identifying each letter in thousands of lower-case letter trigrams presented in the peripheral visual field, we found characteristic error patterns in the results suggestive of the use of particular spatial features. Distinctive features were seldom entirely missed, and we found evidence for errors due to doubling, masking, and migration of features. Dependencies both amongst neighboring letters and in the responses revealed the contingent nature of processing letter strings, challenging the most basic models of reading that ignore either crowding or featural decomposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract We studied the global precedence effect in primary school children with and without developmental dyslexia, using a compound figures task with familiar (Latin) or unfamiliar (Hebrew) letters. The two components of the global precedence effect were considered separately: global advantage (faster processing of global than local letters) and asymmetric interference (global distracters interfere with local targets but not vice versa). Both groups of children showed a global advantage with familiar as well as with unfamiliar letters. Children without developmental dyslexia showed asymmetric interference on familiar letters, but not on unfamiliar ones. Children with developmental dyslexia showed no asymmetric interference, neither for familiar letters nor for unfamiliar ones. The results distinguish between alternative hypothesis regarding the roles of familiarity and visual processing strategies in the compound figures task. Consequences for understanding literacy acquisition and developmental dyslexia are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Letters and words across the visual field can be difficult to identify due to limiting visual factors such as acuity, crowding and position uncertainty. Here, we show that when human readers identify words presented at foveal and para-foveal locations, they act like theoretical observers making optimal use of letter identity and letter position information independently extracted from each letter after an unavoidable and non-optimal letter recognition guess. The novelty of our approach is that we carefully considered foveal and parafoveal letter identity and position uncertainties by measuring crowded letter recognition performance in five subjects without any word context influence. Based on these behavioral measures, lexical access was simulated for each subject by an observer making optimal use of each subject's uncertainties. This free-parameter model was able to predict individual behavioral recognition rates of words presented at different positions across the visual field. Importantly, the model was also able to predict individual mislocation and identity letter errors made during behavioral word recognition. These results reinforce the view that human readers recognize foveal and parafoveal words by parts (the word letters) in a first stage, independently of word context. They also suggest a second step where letter identity and position uncertainties are generated based on letter first guesses and positions. During the third lexical access stage, identity and position uncertainties from each letter look remarkably combined together through an optimal word recognition decision process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even with recent technological advances, handwriting remains the developmental foundation from which communication via written language unfolds. Despite the importance of handwriting to academic success, previous research with beginning school-age children has only indirectly measured the processes of handwriting using post hoc assessments of legibility and accuracy. We adapted new head-mounted eye-tracking methods to directly measure visual–motor coordination of preschool and early elementary school children ( N  = 40) as they copied familiar (English letters) and unfamiliar (Cyrillic symbols) letter-like forms in real time. Results indicated that younger children needed more time to visually process a letter or symbol and initiate a writing action compared with older children despite children of all ages writing letters in a similar amount of time. Analyses also revealed that children copied familiar English letters more efficiently than they copied unfamiliar Cyrillic symbols: They spent more time on and made more visual fixations to the Cyrillic symbols compared with the English letters during the copying task. Finally, children made more visual fixations to less frequently occurring English letters than to more frequently occurring ones. Results are considered in relation to how letter recognition influences the development of automaticity in early handwriting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When learning to write, children often mirror-reverse individual letters. For children learning to use the Latin alphabet, in a left-to-right writing culture, letters that appear to face left (such as J and Z) seem to be more prone to reversal than those that appear to face right (such as B and C). It has been proposed that, because most asymmetrical Latin letters face right, children statistically learn this general regularity and are subsequently biased to write any letter rightward. The evidence for this character-facing bias is circumstantial, however, because letter-facing direction is confounded with other factors that could affect error rates; for instance, J and Z are left-facing, but they are also infrequent. We report the first controlled experimental test of the character-facing bias. We taught 43 Scottish primary schoolchildren (aged 4.8–5.8 years) four artificial, letter-like characters, two of which were left-facing and two of which were right-facing. The characters were novel and so were not subject to prior exposure effects, and alternate groups of children were assigned to identical but mirror-reflected character sets. Children were three times more likely to mirror-write a novel character they had learned in a left-facing format than to mirror-write one they had learned in a right-facing format. This provides the first experimental confirmation of the character-facing bias in literacy development and suggests that implicit knowledge acquired from exposure to written language is readily generalized to novel letter-like forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]