Influence of Mother Tongue on Dynamic Handwriting Features in Primary School

摘要

Handwriting is an essential fine motor skill in school-aged children and plays a crucial role for educational development and autonomy of everyday life. To analyze handwriting movement an objective quantitative kinematic analysis can be performed by using digital tablets. Through this technology it was possible to identify a lot of parameters useful to characterize the handwriting process. In order to study the influence of mother tongue on the dynamic of handwriting in primary school, we examined the writing response of 42 non-native speakers and compared their characteristics with those of 131 Italian mother tongue children. All children undertook one repetitive sequence of le and an Italian sentence written in two different ways: as accurately as and as fast as possible. The results showed that the differences between native and non-native speakers were not significant in the repetitive sequence while a clear influence of mother tongue was present only in the third grade for the sentence tasks.