Arabic Handwriting: Cinematic and Geometric descriptors

Handwriting is a fundamental skill that impacts various fields of one’s everyday-life and professional performance. It plays a crucial role due to its implications in motor and cognitive development of children’s performance in school as well as their self- esteem depends on their handwriting. Nowadays, pupils spend 30 al 60% of their time in school on handwriting and fine motor tasks. Learning to produce a legible handwriting takes a lot of time and effort even for typically developing children (Smith-Engelsman, 1995). The general purpose of the thesis was twofold. One aim was to contribute evidence on the literature that Tunisian children with handwriting difficulties will demonstrate significant difference in the legibility and kinematics of their writing movement compared to proficient writers. The main goal of the study was to determine whether these difficulties are linked somehow to the characteristic of the Arabic writing system. The specific purpose of the thesis was to investigate whether the reading habits may influence the performance of Arabic and Italian adults in a character recognition task. Relating handwriting performance to its underlying processes is important to understand normal handwriting, but also to help restore handwriting deficiencies. The data presented in the first study are extrapolated from a more general research whose purpose is to describe and compare proficient and dysgraphic handwriting in Arabic children using the paradigm proposed by Zesiger (2003). From the very beginning it was clear that the production of schoolchildren with handwriting difficulties possesses some recurrent features. Still there is not a phenomenology for Arabic handwriting to explain it. Thirty 8-10 Tunisian schoolchildren (15 poor writers and 15 proficient writers) participated to the experiment. They were asked to copy a list of words, sentences and letters and to draw 27 pictures of the TOPIG-Test. Their writing and drawing were recorded through a digitizing tablet. Results showed that 40% of participants with writing difficulties used to write letters with a wrong movement direction, omitted dots (on the top and under the letters), and were unable to draw complex figures. A possible explanation of these handwriting difficulties is an inadequate strategy of producing the movement combined to the complexity of the letter. The second study aimed to investigate the kinematics of the handwriting and analyze it using a digitizer tablet. An important purpose of this thesis is to develop a tool that permits to analyze handwriting produced from right to left and vice versa. To this end, a program was created: VB Digital Draw, which is experimental software expressly developed in our department for recording and analyzing the data of my dissertation (Toneatto et al., in progress). Twenty Tunisian children were asked to write six times in six different conditions the Arabic word Sullam [سلم] using a digitizer Wacom pen and Tablet. Results demonstrated that Poor Writers (PW) and Good Writers (GW) presented contrasting profiles in all measured descriptors. Furthermore, PW and GW differ significantly on movement velocities, dysfluency, duration, and stroke production. Comparing to GW, PW’s handwriting was smaller, slower, less fluent and discontinuous (high stroke production). To conclude, the general profile of PW that emerged in this study suggests a deficit at both motor programming and execution levels; since the irregularity of the handwriting raised in all kinematic variables. However, I did not consider that children who were identified as PW are dysgraphic but poor writers. The last study of my thesis was based on the evidence from literature which confirm my belief that writing and reading are intimately linked; An advantage for word recognition in the right visual field and in some case in the upper right visual field has been shown by Darler et al. (2004) and Hagenbeek et al. (2002). The interpretation of these visual field asymmetries is in terms of directional scanning tendencies arising from reading habits. I assume that the main process when reading is influenced by motor activity. Such process is also based on spatial competences. Nevertheless, in a previous experiment we showed that the recognition of a printed letter is primed by the coincidence between fixation point and handwriting starting point. Thus, visual filed asymmetries seems to reflect both reading and writing habits. To further explore this hypothesis I carried out an experiment on Arabic and Italian people who are characterized by opposite script directions. I investigated whether short presentations of four rotations of the character “ ” ( ) presented in upper right, upper left, lower left, and lower right visual fields provide additional information about the influence of reading and writing habits on character recognition. Thirty Italian and thirty Tunisian students of Psychology participated to the experiment. Participants were asked to recognise as quick as possible the character (“u”, “c”, “mirror u”, “mirror c”).or the direction (down, up, left, and right). Further analyses were performed on the ELP (eye landing point) which represents the (eye) fixation point with the four geometrical angles of the character. The results confirm an advantage of the upper right visual field and a facilitation of recognizing the character when the fixation point corresponds to the starting point of writing it. Besides, a difference between the Italian and the Arabic performance was found.