Article published In:
Written Language & LiteracyVol. 1:2 (1998) ► pp.153–169
Through the Looking Glass
Literacy, Writing Systems and Mirror-Image Discrimination
A part/whole judgment task was administered to adults in ten different language communities around the world. Participants were instructed to treat two-dimensional abstract line figures differently from the left/right mirror-image reflections of the same figures. The data support the proposal that sensitivity to this kind of mirror-image contrast is acquired: Literate individuals generally were better able to operate in terms of this distinction than were non-literate participants in the study. Contrary to this general pattern, however, Tamil literates as well as non-literates often treated the left/right mirror-image reflections as non-reflected figures, despite the training to treat them differently. The difference between the Tamil literates and the literate individuals in the other language communities sampled may reflect the fact that mirror-image contrasts are used to different degrees in their respective scripts.
Cited by (41)
Cited by 41 other publications
Wallentin, Mikkel & Johanne S. K. Nedergaard
2023. Reframing self-talk in endurance sports using grammatical taxonomy. Cognitive Semiotics 16:2 ► pp. 91 ff. 
Brossette, Brice, Stéphanie Massol & Bernard Lété
2022. Searching beyond the looking glass with sandwich priming. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 84:4 ► pp. 1178 ff.
Gonthier, Corentin
2022. Cross-cultural differences in visuo-spatial processing and the culture-fairness of visuo-spatial intelligence tests: an integrative review and a model for matrices tasks. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 7:1
Izard, Véronique, Pierre Pica & Elizabeth S. Spelke
2022. Visual foundations of Euclidean geometry. Cognitive Psychology 136 ► pp. 101494 ff.
Lin, Yen-Ting
2022. The influence of language, culture, and environment on the use of spatial referencing in a multilingual context: Taiwan as a test case. Linguistics Vanguard 8:s1 ► pp. 161 ff.
Nölle, Jonas & Michael Spranger
2022. From the field into the lab: causal approaches to the evolution of spatial language. Linguistics Vanguard 8:s1 ► pp. 191 ff.
Pitt, Benjamin, Alexandra Carstensen, Isabelle Boni, Steven T. Piantadosi & Edward Gibson
2022. Different reference frames on different axes: Space and language in indigenous Amazonians. Science Advances 8:47
Winskel, Heather & Manuel Perea
2022. Mirror-image discrimination in monoliterate English and Thai readers: reading with and without mirror letters. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science 6:2 ► pp. 169 ff.
Fernandes, Tânia, Mrudula Arunkumar & Falk Huettig
2021. The role of the written script in shaping mirror-image discrimination: Evidence from illiterate, Tamil literate, and Tamil-Latin-alphabet bi-literate adults. Cognition 206 ► pp. 104493 ff.
Pitt, Benjamin, Stephen Ferrigno, Jessica F. Cantlon, Daniel Casasanto, Edward Gibson & Steven T. Piantadosi
2021. Spatial concepts of number, size, and time in an indigenous culture. Science Advances 7:33
Soares, Ana Paula, Alexandrina Lages, Mariana Velho, Helena M. Oliveira & Juan Hernández-Cabrera
2021. The mirror reflects more for genial than for casual: right-asymmetry bias on the visual word recognition of words containing non-reversal letters. Reading and Writing 34:6 ► pp. 1467 ff.
SOARES, ANA PAULA, ROSA SILVA, FREDERICA FARIA, MARIA SILVA SANTOS, HELENA MENDES OLIVEIRA & LUIS JIMÉNEZ
2021. Literacy effects on artificial grammar learning (AGL) with letters and colors: evidence from preschool and primary school children. Language and Cognition 13:4 ► pp. 534 ff.
Torres, Ana Raquel, Natália B. Mota, Nery Adamy, Angela Naschold, Thiago Z. Lima, Mauro Copelli, Janaina Weissheimer, Felipe Pegado & Sidarta Ribeiro
2021. Selective Inhibition of Mirror Invariance for Letters Consolidated by Sleep Doubles Reading Fluency. Current Biology 31:4 ► pp. 742 ff.
Wang, Shuting Ada, Min-Seok Pang & Paul A. Pavlou
2021. Seeing Is Believing? How Including a Video in Fake News Influences Users’ Reporting the Fake News to Social Media Platforms. SSRN Electronic Journal
Winskel, Heather & Tae-Hoon Kim
2021. The Mirror Generalization Process in Reading: Evidence from Korean Hangul. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 50:2 ► pp. 447 ff.
Marghetis, Tyler, Melanie McComsey & Kensy Cooperrider
2020. Space in Hand and Mind: Gesture and Spatial Frames of Reference in Bilingual Mexico. Cognitive Science 44:12
de Heering, Adélaïde & Régine Kolinsky
2019. Braille readers break mirror invariance for both visual Braille and Latin letters. Cognition 189 ► pp. 55 ff.
Soares, Ana Paula, Alexandrina Lages, Helena Oliveira & Juan Hernández
2019. The mirror reflects more for d than for b: Right asymmetry bias on the visual recognition of words containing reversal letters. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 182 ► pp. 18 ff.
Ahr, Emmanuel, Olivier Houdé & Grégoire Borst
2018. Behavioral evidence of the inhibition of mirror generalization for reversible letters at a perceptual stage of processing. L’Année psychologique Vol. 118:3 ► pp. 255 ff.
de Heering, Adélaïde, Olivier Collignon & Régine Kolinsky
2018. Blind readers break mirror invariance as sighted do. Cortex 101 ► pp. 154 ff.
Fernandes, Tânia, Bárbara Coelho, Fanny Lima & São Luís Castro
2018. The handle of literacy: evidence from preliterate children and illiterate adults on orientation discrimination of graspable and non-graspable objects. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 33:3 ► pp. 278 ff.
Linke, Annika, Elizabeth Roach-Fox, Ellen Vriezen, Asuri Narayan Prasad & Rhodri Cusack
2018. Altered activation and functional asymmetry of exner's area but not the visual word form area in a child with sudden-onset, persistent mirror writing. Neuropsychologia 117 ► pp. 322 ff.
Bianchi, Ivana, Marco Bertamini, Roberto Burro & Ugo Savardi
2017. Opposition and Identicalness: Two Basic Components of Adults’ Perception and Mental Representation of Symmetry. Symmetry 9:8 ► pp. 128 ff.
Erlikhman, Gennady, Lars Strother, Iskra Barzakov & Gideon Caplovitz
2017. On the Legibility of Mirror-Reflected and Rotated Text. Symmetry 9:3 ► pp. 28 ff.
Fernandes, Tânia & Isabel Leite
2017. Mirrors are hard to break: A critical review and behavioral evidence on mirror-image processing in developmental dyslexia. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 159 ► pp. 66 ff.
Kolinsky, Régine & Arlette Verhaeghe
2017. Lace your mind: the impact of an extra-curricular activity on enantiomorphy. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science 1:2 ► pp. 57 ff.
Pelkey, Jamin
2017. Greimas embodied: How kinesthetic opposition grounds the semiotic square. Semiotica 2017:214
Shapero, Joshua A.
2017. Does Environmental Experience Shape Spatial Cognition? Frames of Reference Among Ancash Quechua Speakers (Peru). Cognitive Science 41:5 ► pp. 1274 ff.
Fernandes, Tânia, Isabel Leite & Régine Kolinsky
2016. Into the Looking Glass: Literacy Acquisition and Mirror Invariance in Preschool and First‐Grade Children. Child Development 87:6 ► pp. 2008 ff.
Meakins, Felicity, Caroline Jones & Cassandra Algy
2016. Bilingualism, language shift and the corresponding expansion of spatial cognitive systems. Language Sciences 54 ► pp. 1 ff.
Dehaene, Stanislas, Laurent Cohen, José Morais & Régine Kolinsky
2015. Illiterate to literate: behavioural and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16:4 ► pp. 234 ff.
Blackburne, Liwei King, Marianna D. Eddy, Priya Kalra, Debbie Yee, Pawan Sinha, John D. E. Gabrieli & Zhong-Lin Lu
2014. Neural Correlates of Letter Reversal in Children and Adults. PLoS ONE 9:5 ► pp. e98386 ff.
Pegado, Felipe, Kimihiro Nakamura & Thomas Hannagan
2014. How does literacy break mirror invariance in the visual system?. Frontiers in Psychology 5
Fernandes, Tânia & Régine Kolinsky
2013. From hand to eye: The role of literacy, familiarity, graspability, and vision-for-action on enantiomorphy. Acta Psychologica 142:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Danziger, Eve
2011. Distinguishing three-dimensional forms from their mirror-images: Whorfian results from users of intrinsic frames of linguistic reference. Language Sciences 33:6 ► pp. 853 ff.
O’Meara, Carolyn & Gabriela Pérez Báez
2011. Spatial frames of reference in Mesoamerican languages. Language Sciences 33:6 ► pp. 837 ff.
Pegado, Felipe, Kimihiro Nakamura, Laurent Cohen & Stanislas Dehaene
2011. Breaking the symmetry: Mirror discrimination for single letters but not for pictures in the Visual Word Form Area. NeuroImage 55:2 ► pp. 742 ff.
Dehaene, Stanislas, Kimihiro Nakamura, Antoinette Jobert, Chihiro Kuroki, Seiji Ogawa & Laurent Cohen
2010. Why do children make mirror errors in reading? Neural correlates of mirror invariance in the visual word form area. NeuroImage 49:2 ► pp. 1837 ff.
Dehaene, Stanislas & Laurent Cohen
2007. Cultural Recycling of Cortical Maps. Neuron 56:2 ► pp. 384 ff.
KATAOKA, KUNIYOSHI
2005. Cultural and Cognitive Diversity and Frames of Reference (S. C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity). ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 22:2 ► pp. 472 ff.
Levinson, Stephen C.
2003. Space in Language and Cognition,
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.