Florence et al. (2004) examined the effect of using the modality of touch (haptic modality) for teaching young children to read.
Reading acquisition is thought to depend upon acquiring knowledge of phonological and orthographic representations and making connections between the two. But the authors believe that learning the letter-sound correspondences is not ‘implicit’, and that the connection needs in some cases to be highlighted and augmented through other sensory modalities such as touch. The authors use a teaching technique developed by Fernald (1943) called the ‘multisensory trace’ which involves tracing a written word with an index finger while pronouncing the word and looking at it.
The study tested 3 treatments: letters were explored visually and haptically (by tracing foam letter forms in the context of words, so the letters were traced in the order of their spelling), or letters were explored only visually, or letters were explored visually but in a sequential manner. Results showed significant increase in performance measures (pseudoword decoding test and letter recognition test) for the visual and haptic group.
Definition of orthography from wikipedia:
The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.) Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós (“correct”) and γράφειν gráphein (“to write”). Orthography is distinct from typography.
Orthography describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used, and the rules about how to write these symbols. Depending on the nature of the writing system, the rules may include punctuation, spelling and capitalization.
