Abstract
Pre-reading kindergartners (n = 64) were divided equally into experimental and control groups of similar age and IQ. The experimentals discriminated the reversible letters, b, d, p, q, using special left and right markers plus brief instruction in both up-down and left-right discrimination. The controls had no markers and no instruction. The experimentals improved significantly on the over-all discrimination of letters, but the significant reduction of left-right reversal errors was partly offset by a significant increase of up-down inversion errors. These results held for both a detection task and a recognition task, and there were no interactions with age or sex. The results were interpreted as evidence that the difficulty that young children have in discriminating left-right orientation is due simply to the lack of obvious directional reference points.
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