Mirror writing in children (names)

Mirror writing in French preschool children has been studied very little. There are two reasons for this: on the one hand, researchers long believed that it was only done by left-handed children; on the other hand, teachers were reluctant to show that their students wrote incorrectly! 

This last point is important because, even though it is often valued, particularly in some famous writings by Leonardo da Vinci, teachers should discourage mirror writing. It is unconventional and can be very confusing when children write, or even read, for example “b” instead of its mirror image “d.”

Nevertheless, thanks to a constraint imposed by the material, we were able to obtain spontaneous right-to-left writings of their first names from nearly half a thousand children aged 4 to 7 in our research between 2010 and 2014.

The raw data presented here shows these writings (scanned), in uppercase letters (for 331 children) and lowercase letters (for 135 children). For each child, we specify the gender (boy or girl), age, and hand (left or right) used in the reproduced writings. In addition, for most of them, we have added a left-to-right writing of the name obtained during the same test. These latter writings are essential for studying changes depending on the direction of writing: do children reverse the letters that make up their first name when switching from left-to-right to right-to-left writing (or vice versa)?

These data are also of historical interest, as they were collected before digital tools (computers, tablets, and smartphones) had a preponderant influence on young children's reading and writing learning.