Children's emotional bond with their own first names is often used by caregivers to introduce them to literacy. From early on, many children are exposed to their written name on their personal possessions, such as their bedroom door, their drinking glass and cubby hole in nursery school, and their artwork displayed at home or school. From a very young age, they are encouraged to copy their names, to try to write them on their own, to name the letters in them, and so on. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that children's knowledge of their written names emerges early. Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982, p. 212) state: “The child's own name as a model of writing, as a first stable written string and as a prototype of all subsequent writing, often fulfills a very special function in the psychogenesis [of writing].”

In recent years, studies have examined the development of this knowledge and its possible contributions to early literacy. Children raised in literate societies recognize their names very early. In a study by Villaume and Wilson (1989), some 2-year-olds and most 3-year-olds could already select their own written name when presented with three options. Moreover, many 4- to 5-year-olds can print their name in conventional spelling (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Tolchinsky–Landsmann & Levin, 1985). By the age of 4–6, when writing words with random letters or spelling errors, children often overuse the letters that appear in their name (Bloodgood, 1999; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Gombert & Fayol, 1992; Levin, Share, & Shatil, 1996; Treiman, Kessler, & Bourassa, 2001) and are more proficient at naming these letters than other letters (Arrow, Fletcher–Flinn, & Nicholson, 2003; Levin & Aram, 2004; Treiman & Broderick, 1998; Treiman & Kessler, 2003).

How does familiarity with their written names promote children's literacy? The overuse of name letters in writing other words displayed by children immersed in different languages (English, French, and Hebrew) suggests that they learn from their name how to retrieve and print a certain number of letters. This may arouse their interest in letters in general and alert them to the graphic features of the alphabet. Similarly, learning the names of certain letters may spark their curiosity and sensitize them to letter names, particularly in alphabets whose letter names are phonologically patterned, such as English, Turkish, or Korean (see Treiman, Tincoff, & Richmond–Welty, 1997). Moreover, when children's names provide them with knowledge of the sounds of several letters, as in the case of Hebrew, where all letter names start with the sounds that the letters stand for (in their role as consonants; Levin & Aram, 2004), this may help them understand the underlying alphabetic principle of writing: the mapping of graphemes onto phonemes.

The studies above all suggest that young children gain in letter knowledge (i.e., printing letters, naming them, and possibly retrieving their sound) from their experience of their name. However, they do not indicate whether this experience enhances children's conception of superordinate print characteristics that are common to most current scripts, for example, linearity, segmentation into written units, and controlled number of units per word.

Children's knowledge about their own written name appears quite unique. Bialystok (1991) showed that many 3- to 5-year-olds change their reading of a written word on the basis of contextual cues, altering their response when the drawing that accompanied the written word was changed. In contrast, children of only 2–3 years of age already recognize their name as a fixed string of letters and attribute to this string a fixed meaning across contexts (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Villaume & Wilson, 1989). Similarly, whereas children as young as 3–4 are only sporadically occupied with scribbling, copying, or spelling out a specific word, they are frequently encouraged to produce their written name: to scribble it, then to copy it by hand or computer, and finally to spell it out on their own. We suggest that these routine experiences with their own name promote children's conception of name writing, including the superordinate characteristics of print, such as segmentation into units and linearity.

The question is whether the unique experience of name recognition and writing advances children's knowledge of superordinate print characteristics in reference to name prior to print in general. If this is the case, a gap should appear from early on between the levels of name writing and word writing. This question is important because it sheds light on the possible contribution of intensive literate experience with particular stimuli to the acquisition of literacy.

The changes in children's writing from ages 2 to 5 were recently studied among Israeli and Dutch children (Levin & Bus, 2003), who were asked to write their names and several dictated words. The development of their writing was described by means of a model composed of three sequential schemes: graphic, writinglike, and symbolic. The graphic scheme ranges from scribbling to small forms, such as a circle or a square constricted in size, and depends primarily on the child's graphic control. Children create such products both as writing and as drawing, although neither the children themselves nor mothers of same age children are able to tell whether they were meant to be writings or drawings. Consequently, as scribbling is generally accepted as the starting point for drawing (e.g., Adi-Japha, Levin, & Solomon, 1998; Kellogg, 1969), it can be conceived as the starting point for writing as well.

The writinglike scheme reflects children's growing assimilation of writinglike features: segmentation into units, linearity, arbitrary simple units (e.g., dots, lines or small circles), or complex units that graphically approximate letters. Children and mothers of same age children recognize these products as writings rather than drawings. The symbolic scheme ranges from the use of symbolic units (numbers or letters), through writing with letters that partially represent the required sounds (partial phonetic writing), to conventional spelling. These products are clearly recognizable as attempts to write, and, at the highest levels, are actually readable.

In the age range we studied, 52% of the writings produced were graphic, 34% were writinglike, and 14% were symbolic. Thus, although about half of the products included features of writing, as opposed to drawing, the majority contained neither conventionally shaped letters nor letters chosen on the basis of their sound value. The study analyzed developmental changes in writing in very young children, revealing scores increasing with age. However, no distinction was made between name and word writing, both of which were regarded by the model as representing writing in general.

The current investigation examines whether name writing develops faster than word writing and whether it is related to writing in general, before and after the transition to printing letters and understanding the alphabetic principle. Four data sets collected in three studies were employed. In all three studies, children were asked to write their own name and several dictated words, and the products were analyzed by means of the model described above.

In Study I, the participants were low socioeconomic status (SES) Israeli children (Aram, 2004; Aram & Biron, 2004), in Study II middle SES Israeli and Dutch children (Levin & Bus, 2003), and in Study III middle to high SES Dutch children (Both–de Vries & Bus, 2004). Study III provided two data sets, because the sample was divided in two with each group presented with a different list of words. The four data sets span the age range from 2 years, 4 months (2;4) to 5;1. The two orthographies, the variety in SES, and the extended age range offer the opportunity to examine the discrepancies between name and word writings on a broad spectrum across factors significant to literacy development, so as to show the robustness of these phenomena.

We predicted that children would be more advanced in name writing than in word writing. It was predicted that name writing would progress with age more rapidly, so that the gap between name and word writing would increase with age. Finally, due to children's distinct experience with their name, the intercorrelations between words were expected to be higher than the correlations between name writing and other word writing.

METHOD

The data employed were collected in studies designed for different purposes. However, in all studies young children who had not yet been exposed to the formal teaching of reading or writing were asked to write their name and several dictated words. The scoring scale devised by Levin and Bus (2003) was used to analyze the data from all studies.

Procedure and task

Children were tested individually in a quiet corner or separate room in their play- group, nursery, preschool, or kindergarten. The interviewers were female students.

Each child was asked to write his/her name and then several dictated words presented one at a time. The instructions were straightforward: “Write your name” and “Write X” (a certain word). All the words were chosen for being frequently used in discourse with children, so that it was presumed that the participants were familiar with them on the oral plane.

In Study I, children were given a pencil to write with. In Studies II and III, six colored felt-tipped pens were offered, and the children selected whichever one or ones they wished to use. A sheet of white paper at least A5 in size (148 × 210 mm) was provided for each item. The interviewer recorded the dictated word, the direction of writing, and any oral comments made by the child.

Scoring

The writing scale consists of three sequential schemes: graphic, writinglike, and symbolic. Written products are first sorted by scheme, and then scored by subscale: 0–2 for the graphic scheme; 3–8 for the writinglike scheme; and 9–13 for the symbolic scheme. The scale is described in detail in Table 1.

STUDY III

The sample employed for assessing coding reliability consisted of 21 children equally divided by age group. Cronbach's alpha values for the youngest, middle and oldest group were .98, .97, and .97 respectively. The values for sets 1 and 2 were .96 and .97, respectively.

Age and name versus word writing

Table 2 shows the mean writing level by age in each study. Results suggest that writing improved with age and that name was written on a more advanced level than words.

Nonparametric analyses were carried out as the scale was not strictly interval. To test whether name writing was more advanced than word writing, we conducted the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test, comparing score on name with mean score on dictated words for each age group separately.

STUDY III

Once again, more children in all age groups scored higher on name than on dictated words than vice versa. The difference was significant for the youngest, middle, and oldest groups (Z=3.05, p<.001; Z=3.90, p<.001; Z=4.95, p<.001, respectively, each N=32).

The gap between the level of name and word writing was found to increase with age, with a Kruskal–Wallis test revealing a significant effect of age across the two data sets, χ² (df=2)=11.09, p<.004. Mann–Whitney U tests showed the gap between name and word writing in the youngest group (mean rank=27.46) to differ significantly from the gap in the middle (mean rank=37.44) and oldest groups (mean rank=40.34, Z=-2.12, p<.03, N=32; Z=-3.37, p<.001, N=32, respectively), whereas the gap between the middle and oldest groups did not differ significantly. These results suggest that progression on name is faster than on other word writing, at least to the age of 4;6.

Results across studies clearly substantiate the hypothesis that name writing improves more rapidly with age than the writing of dictated words. Confirmation was obtained across a wide age range and among children immersed in different orthographies/languages, raised in two cultures, and of varied SES.

Relations between name and word writings

To test whether the intercorrelations between words exceeded the correlation between word and name writing, parametric statistics (i.e., Pearson correlations), were required. Although our previous analyses were nonparametric, the use of parametric statistics was adopted because they enable comparing dependent correlations; furthermore, the Pearson and Spearman correlations were found to be very close. Pearson correlations for the entire sample, corrected for age group, are presented in Table 3. In all three studies, the mean correlation between the level of writing of each word and the writings of all other words, corrected for age group, exceeded the corrected correlation between word writing and name writing. We then performed t tests to compare the correlation between the writing of two words with the correlation between each of these words and name writing. The formula used for the t tests took into account the dependency between the correlations, as they were based on the same sample (Cohen & Cohen, 1983, pp. 56–57). The results of this analysis appear in Table 4.

STUDY III

The mean corrected intercorrelations between each dictated word and all other words were moderately high (r=.74–.65, mean r=.71; and r=.76–.65, mean r=.70), for item sets 1 and 2, respectively. In contrast, the corrected correlations between name and word writing were either low or insignificant (r=.38–.21, mean r=.30; and r=.49–.28, mean r=.41) for the two sets, respectively. As shown in Table 4, the correlations between words were significantly higher than between word and name writing in 52 of the 56 comparisons for item set 1, and 39 of the 56 comparisons for item set 2. This score is above the chance level of 5% significance (χ²=32.04, p<.001).

To conclude, in line with expectations, in Studies I and III name writing and dictated word writing reveal a certain degree of independence, with words producing stronger correlations among themselves than with name. In Study II, however, most of the intercorrelations were at a similar level, varying from moderate to high. Nonetheless, here the mean intercorrelation between words was somewhat higher than between words and names as well.

Figure 1 presents the writing of names and dictated words by eight Israeli and Dutch children drawn from Studies I and III. Examples 1–4 illustrate major points in the development of writing of own name: from pseudoletters (example no. 1), to partly pseudo-partly random letters (no. 2), to a conventional letter (initial) followed by random letters (no. 3), to conventional spelling of a name (no. 4). The rest (nos. 5–8) are all conventional and readable spellings of names.

Word and name writing by Israeli and Dutch preschoolers

All the examples illustrate that name writing is more advanced than the writings of two dictated words that appear alike. Moreover, the discrepancy between name and dictated word writings varies across children. Conventional name writing appears along with drawings (no. 4), scribbles (no. 5), wavy lines imitating text (no. 6), random writing that replicates own name writing (no. 7), and random letters some of which are borrowed from own name (no. 8). Two examples deserve special reference. Very few children drew when asked to write (no. 4). We believe that drawing is a sign of a child's refusal to pretend to write when he or she knows there is a correct way to write a word, but is unable to produce it. Hence drawings were not scored as writing (Gombert & Fayol, 1992; Levin, Share, et al., 1996). “Three tress” were written by some children as three words (no. 8) suggesting that for these children each written word stands for a referent, not a word. The fact that the three “words” for tree are not spelled identically lends credence to the interpretation that these children do not write words, but rather mark objects, as indeed, three trees may not necessarily all be alike (see Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Levin & Bus, 2003).