Simultaneous and successive discrimination of similar letters: comparison of training techniques and transfer effects

Letter discrimination training and its transfer to a trigram recognition task were investigated among 64 kindergarteners. Pretraining, method of stimulus presentation, and type of stimuli were varied in a factorial design. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed that while pretraining facilitated learning the discriminations, presentation method and stimulus type did not. The presentation method by stimulus type interaction for number correct during discrimination training was significant at the p less than or equal to .07 level. No effect was noted on transfer task performance.