Abstract

The purpose of this study is to describe the semiotic work associated with access to literacy. The term literacy identifies here the skills of reading and writing in relation to their learning. The main thesis that we want to support is that sign production and abductive inference have a central role in the learning processes, as well as in the process of acquiring the fundamental skills of emergent literacy (the discovery of the phoneme and phonemic awareness). Through an analysis of writing acts of pre-school children we will see how a first access to literacy occurs through the construction of a child’s spontaneous linguistic theory and a related series of abductive inferences. This path made of attempts and corrections leads children to tune in to a collectively regulated horizon of meaning