Abstract: 133 5-to-12-year olds from kindergarten and primary school wereasked to write their names, Arabic numerals from 1 to 10 and eight Chi-nese words. In the meantime, they were tested on their right/left spatialorientation. The results show that the frequency of mirror writing appe-ared to decrease with the increase of age. When writing in a habitual le-ft-to-right direction, the subjects produced fewer mirror words than whenwriting in a non-habitual right-to-left direction, writing with both handsproduced more mirror words than writing with a single hand, and writingwith left hand produced more mirror words than writing with right ha-nd. The subjects having good spatial orientation wrote fewer mirror wordsthan those having poor spatial orientation. After reviewing various hypo-theses of mirror writing, we propose a hypothesis of skill: the more ski-llfully a child writes, the fewer mirror words he produces. The mechanismof mirror writing is very complicated and affected by many factors.

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