Early readers know letter shape without knowing letter names

Print knowledge is known to be important for reading acquisition, but it has only been measured using letter recognition. However, early readers may possess another kind of print knowledge: they may be familiar with letter shapes through exposure in their environment. Here, we provide evidence for this intriguing possibility. We tested 300 children at the beginning of formal reading instruction of the Indian language Kannada on four tasks. Each child performed a letter shape familiarity task, a letter recognition task, a visual search task involving letters, and a rapid automatized digit naming task. Our main finding is that, despite having little or no knowledge of letter names, children were highly familiar with letter shapes. This familiarity was also associated uniquely with a visual processing advantage, whereby children with high letter familiarity also searched faster for upright compared to inverted letters. Our results reveal a far deeper knowledge of print among early readers than previously assumed, which confers on them a visual processing advantage.