The ABCs of Learning the ABCs

A fundamental aspect of learning to read is mastering the ABCs. This includes recognizing the letter names and their corresponding sounds. In some classrooms, the focus is on memorizing each letter name and sound, with equal attention to each letter. Researchers have demonstrated that children’s letter learning is influenced by many factors.  Some of these may be obvious, but others are less so. Understanding how letter learning takes place is practically useful as parents and teachers impart this critical skill to their children (McBride, in press).

What influences mastery?

What influences children’s mastery of letter names and recognition of letters? For any given child, letters are easier to recognize when they are

*In the child’s own name. This is a biggie. We naturally learn things better when we can relate them to ourselves. Children are likely to pay more attention to letters in their own names (Treiman et al., 2001), especially the first letter in their own names (Justice et al.,2006; Puranik et al., 2014).

*Distinctive in look. There is a reason that some ABC books create elaborate artwork around letters. The letter S can be made to look like a snake, and M can represent two mountains (Ehri, 2013). There is even some evidence that children find symmetric letters easier to learn than asymmetric ones (e.g., Yin & McBride 2023). Symmetric ones can be divided in half and still look the same. Examples are O, T and X. Letters that can be linked to a picturable object are easier to recognize and are made more concrete for children.

*More accessible in memory. Here, we invoke the “ABC” song and consider some renditions of it. Have you ever heard children singing this song, confident in the beginning (ABC…) but also the end (XYZ) and not so much in the middle? From the field of memory research, we know that there is both a primacy and a recency effect for human memory: If you are given a long list of things to remember, you are most likely to remember the first 2 or 3 and the last 2 or 3 but fewer items in the middle. It’s the same with the letters of the alphabet (McBride-Chang, 1999; Worden & Boettcher, 1990). One practical implication of this is that children may need less time to learn the first and last three letters of the alphabet and need to spend more time on those in the middle.

*Less confusable. Children are often confused by letters that somehow have a mirror image of themselves, such as b and d, and p, and q (Bornstein et al., 1981; Dehaene, 2010). In nature, we tend to view objects that are presented in left vs. right profile as the same object (e.g., a tree from the left or right perspective). In contrast, objects that are upside down are clearly different from those that are right side up, such as p and  b, and M and W. This is one explanation for why it is particularly difficult to distinguish (and learn to write) letters that have mirror images of one another; b and d, and p and q. Children need a lot of practice in distinguishing these (Treiman and Kessler, 2011).

Apart from learning to recognize and write letters, children need to understand connections of these letters to their sounds. What influences the extent to which letter sounds can be learned? Sounds are easier to map to letters when the name of the letter begins with the sound it makes (McBride-Chang, 1999; Treiman & Broderick, 1998; Treiman & Rodriguez, 1999; Treiman et al., 2001). This applies to letters like T, P, B, or Z. In order to pronounce any of these letters, one must use the sound that it makes. T starts as /t/ and Z as /z/. There are other letters that have some connection to their sounds, but this connection is at the end of the letter name. This applies to letters such as L, M, N, and R. The sounds made by these letters end the letter name. For example, L is pronounced as el and N as en. English speakers are primed to focus on the first sound in a word and less primed to focus on the final sound in a word (e.g., McBride-Chang, 1999). Finally, there are letters that have no link to their sound. This applies to H, Q, and W. Sounds made by these letters are more difficult to learn because the sounds have no connection to their pronunciations. (Witness the child who thinks that W makes the /d/ sound, for example.)

There are practical implications of this information. In particular, it is easiest to learn letters whose names start with their sounds (e.g., B, D) and most difficult to learn letters with no connections between letter name and letter sound (e.g., W, Q). Thus, again, rather than spending equal time on all letter names and sounds, it is better to spend more time on the difficult ones and less time on the easy ones (McBride-Chang, 1999; Treiman et al., 1994).

Advice on letter learning

Because learning letter names and letter sounds are similar but not the same activity, our advice on letter learning addresses learning letter names and specific letter sounds.  

*Learning letter names. Make sure children engage concretely in letter activities such as identifying letters in both capital and small forms and across fonts. In addition, helping children to create letters and notice their forms helps to make letters, which are somewhat abstract concepts—symbols, more concrete. Focusing on the letter that begins one’s name makes it much more real and easy to remember. We also advocate for singing and reciting the alphabet song in video form in order to link the name and appearance of letters easily. Sesame Street and many other educational programs do this very well, and this is useful for reinforcing early learning.

*Learning specific letter sounds. Reading alphabet books with an emphasis on phoneme awareness helps build the letter sound connection (Brabham et al., 2006), but it is important to understand something about phonological awareness. Children’s awareness of phonemes, or individual speech sounds, is easier to facilitate when the phoneme is presented alone, rather than within a consonant cluster (Treiman & Weatherston, 1992). It is easier to hear the /t/ sound in tap than in trap because the /t/ sound in trap gets lost in the cluster. Therefore, when presenting the connection between letter names and sounds, we prefer to associate the letter with a word that does not begin with a consonant cluster. To hear the /s/ sound clearly, for example, it is easier to say that S is for sun than S is for snake. Similarly, F is for fan is better than F is for flower. In both examples, it is easier to hear the letter sound when it is followed directly by a vowel than a consonant.

As the Science of Reading (SoR) research often reminds us, English is complicated. The ideas presented above will not always be easy to implement in the classroom. However, knowing some of these fundamentals about human cognition and learning as applied to the alphabet can be useful for planning. Rather than spending one week on each letter, it is probably more efficient to spend more time in teaching the appearances and sounds of tricky letters—letters that are more confusable either in appearance or in sound-letter name connection.

References

Bornstein, M. H., Ferdinandsen, K., and Gross, C. G. (1981). Perception of symmetry in infancy. Developmental Psychology 17, 82–86. https://doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.17.1.82

Brabham, E. G., Murray, B. A., & Bowden, S. H. (2006). Reading alphabet books in kindergarten: Effects of instructional emphasis and media practice. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 20, 219-234.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02568540609594563

Dehaene, S., Nakamura, K., Jobert, A., Kuroki, C., Ogawa, S., & Cohen, L. (2010). Why do children make mirror errors in reading? Neural correlates of mirror invariance in the visual word form area. NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.), 49(2), 1837–1848.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.09.024

Ehri, L. C. (2013). Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Fischer, J. P. (2018). Studies on the written characters orientation and its influence on digit reversal by children. Educational Psychology, 38, 1–16. https://doi: 10.1080/01443410.2017.1359239

Justice, L. M., Pence, K., Bowles, R. B., & Wiggins, A. (2006). An investigation of four hypotheses concerning the order by which 4-year-old children learn the alphabet letters. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 21(3), 374–389.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2006.07.010

Puranik, C. S., Petscher, Y., & Lonigan, C. J. (2014). Learning to write letters: Examination of student and letter factors. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 128, 152–170.
https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.jecp.2014.07.009.

McBride, C. (In press). Children’s Literacy Development: A Cross-cultural Perspective on Learning to Read and Write (3rd ed.). Routledge.

McBride-Chang, C. (1999). The ABCs of the ABCs: The development of letter name and letter sound knowledge. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 45, 285–308.

Treiman, R., & Broderick, V. (1998). What’s in a name: Children’s knowledge about the letters in their own name. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 70, 97–116.
https://doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1998.2448

Treiman, R., and Kessler, B. (2011). Similarities among the shapes of writing and their effects on learning. Written Language & Literacy, 14, 39–57. https://doi: 10.1075/wll.14.1.03tre

Treiman, R., Sotak, L., & Bowman, M. (2001). The roles of letter names and letter sounds in connecting print and speech. Memory & Cognition, 29, 860–873.
https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196415

Treiman, R., & Weatherston, S. (1992). Effects of linguistic structure on children’s ability to isolate initial consonants. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84(2), 174.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.84.2.174

Treiman, R., Weatherston, S., & Berch, D. (1994). The role of letter names in children’s learning of phoneme–grapheme relations. Applied Psycholinguistics, 15(1), 97–122.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716400006998

Yin, L., & McBride, C. (2023). A longitudinal study on sensitivity to symmetry in writing and associations with early literacy abilities. Frontiers in Education (Lausanne), 8.
https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1150075