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Handwriting, spelling, and narrative competence in the fictional stories of Italian primary-school children

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Abstract

Previous studies with English-speaking children showed that handwriting and spelling abilities played a critical role in the development of writing fluency and quality, particularly during the transition from the kindergarten to primary school; in contrast, studies dealing with orthographically transparent languages found small or no relations between transcription skills and writing competence. The present study examined the question of whether, in a transparent language like Italian, spelling and handwriting abilities predicted the narrative competence of primary-school children, and whether their effects varied as a function of grade. To this purpose, 150 Italian-speaking children (77 boys and 73 girls), attending the third, fourth, and fifth grades, were examined: they underwent an assessment of receptive vocabulary and wrote a fictional story starting from a keyword. Written compositions were scored for handwriting quality, spelling errors, productivity, syntactic complexity, and the use of narrative categories. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that, after eliminating the contributions of receptive vocabulary and productivity measures, only handwriting quality was significantly and positively related to the number of narrative categories utilized by children. In addition, the impact of the two transcription skills did not vary across grades. These findings suggest that, in a transparent language like Italian, spelling ability has a limited influence on the development of narrative competence in primary-school children (at least after the third grade). On the other hand, extensive practice in handwriting might have beneficial effects, by freeing resources that children might utilize to improve the structural organization of written narratives.

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Notes

  1. “Robot” was included in the animate category because many currently available robots exhibit life-like behaviors (Bartneck et al. 2009), and children have been shown to hold “animistic intuitions” that they use to attribute intelligence, biology, and agency to nonliving robots (Okita and Schwartz 2006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Via degli Apuli 1, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Emiddia Longobardi & Emiliano Pizzicannella

  2. Department of Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Pietro Spataro

Authors
  1. Emiddia Longobardi
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  2. Pietro Spataro
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Correspondence to Emiddia Longobardi.

Additional information

Emiddia Longobardi. Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Via degli Apuli 1, 00185 Rome, Italy. E-mail: emiddia.longobardi@uniroma1.it

Emiddia Longobardi. Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Via degli Apuli 1, 00185 Rome, Italy. E-mail: emiddia.longobardi@uniroma1.it

Current themes of research:

Language development; gestural communication; pragmatic abilities; adult-child interaction; text composition; language assessment; theory of mind.

Most relevant publications in the field of Psychology of Education:

Longobardi, E., Spataro, P., Rossi-Arnaud, C. (2016). Relations between theory of mind, mental state language, and social adjustment in primary-school children. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13(4), 424–438.

Longobardi, E., Spataro, P., Renna, M., Rossi-Arnaud C. (2014). Comparing fictional, personal and hypothetical narratives in primary school: story grammar and mental state language. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 29(2), 257–275.

Longobardi, E., Rossi-Arnaud, C., Spataro, P. (2011). Longitudinal examination of early communicative development: evidence from a parent report questionnaire. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 29(3), 572–592.

Longobardi, E., Rossi-Arnaud, C., Spataro, P. (2012). Individual differences in the prevalence of words and gestures in the second year of life: developmental trends in Italian children. Infant Behavior & Development, 35, 847–859.

Pietro Spataro. Department of Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Rome, Italy. E-mail: pietro.spataro@uniroma1.it

Current themes of research:

Language development; implicit memory; working memory; attention.

Most relevant publications in the field of Psychology of Education:

Longobardi, E., Spataro, P., Putnick, D., Bornstein, M.H. (2015). Noun and verb production in maternal and child language: continuity, stability, and prediction across the second year of life. Language Learning and Development, 12(2), 183–198.

Longobardi, E., Spataro, P., Frigerio, A., Rescorla, L. (2015). Language and social competence in typically developing children and late talkers between 18 and 35 months of age. Early Child Development and Care, 186(3–4), 436–452.

Longobardi, E., Rossi-Arnaud, C., Spataro, P., Putnick, D., Bornstein, M.H. (2015). Children’s acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian: contrasting the role of frequency and positional salience in maternal language. Journal of Child Language, 42(1), 95–121.

Cottini, M., Pieroni, L., Spataro, P., Devescovi, A., Longobardi, E., Rossi-Arnaud, C. (2015). Featuring binding and the processing of global-local shake in bilingual and monolingual children. Memory & Cognition, 43, 441–452.

Emiliano Pizzicannella. Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, University Sapienza of Rome, Via degli Apuli 1, 00185 Rome, Italy. E-mail: epizzicannella@gmail.com

Current themes of research:

Language development; text composition; language assessment.

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Longobardi, E., Spataro, P. & Pizzicannella, E. Handwriting, spelling, and narrative competence in the fictional stories of Italian primary-school children. Eur J Psychol Educ 33, 277–293 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-017-0328-y

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