Learning handwriting: factors affecting pen-movement fluency in beginning writers

Skilled handwriting of single letters is associated not only with a neat final product but also with fluent pen-movement, characterized by a smooth pen-tip velocity profile. Our study explored fluency when writing single letters in children who were just beginning to learn to handwrite, and the extent to which this was predicted by the children’s pen-control ability and by their letter knowledge. 176 Norwegian children formed letters by copying and from dictation (i.e., in response to hearing letter sounds). Performance on these tasks was assessed in terms of the counts of velocity inversions as the children produced sub-letter features that would be produced by competent handwriters as a single, smooth (ballistic) action. We found that there was considerable variation in these measures across writers, even when producing well-formed letters. Children also copied unfamiliar symbols, completed various pen-control tasks (drawing lines, circles, garlands, and figure eights), and tasks that assessed knowledge of letter sounds and shapes. After controlling for pen-control ability, pen-movement fluency was affected by letter knowledge (specifically children’s performance on a task that required selecting graphemes on the basis of their sound). This was the case when children retrieved letter forms from dictated letter sounds, but also when directly copying letters and, unexpectedly, when copying unfamiliar symbols. These findings suggest that familiarity with a letter affects movement fluency during letter production but may also point towards a more general ability to process new letter-like symbols in children with good letter knowledge

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217-236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output

Reading during the composition of multi-sentence texts: an eye-movement study

Writers composing multi-sentence texts have immediate access to a visual representation of what they have written. Little is known about the detail of writers’ eye movements within this text during production. We describe two experiments in which competent adult writers’ eye-movements were tracked while performing short expository writing tasks. These are contrasted with conditions in which participants read and evaluated researcher-provided texts. Writers spent a mean of around 13% of their time looking back into their text. Initiation of these look-back sequences was strongly predicted by linguistically important boundaries in their ongoing production (e.g., writers were much more likely to look back immediately prior to starting a new sentence). 36% of look-back sequences were associated with sustained reading and the remainder with less patterned forward and backward saccades between words ("hopping"). Fixation and gaze durations and the presence of word-length effects suggested lexical processing of fixated words in both reading and hopping sequences. Word frequency effects were not present when writers read their own text. Findings demonstrate the technical possibility and potential value of examining writers’ fixations within their just-written text. We suggest that these fixations do not serve solely, or even primarily, in monitoring for error, but play an important role in planning ongoing production

Introduction: Constraints on spelling changes

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Linguistic Units, Hierarchies and Dynamics of Written Language Production

This study reports on the results of five discontinuous typing paradigm experiments in which subjects (native English speakers in experiment 1 and native German speakers in experiments 2 to 5) had to type words presented to them in various modes. In experiment 1 the words were presented in visual form. In experiment 2 words were presented orally and the results are compared with typing following visual word presentation. Experiment 3 compares typing following visual word and picture presentation. In experiment 4 subjects were required to type pseudo-words, whilst in the final experiment the typing responses, following oral and visual word presentation, were delayed by an extended preparatory period. In all experiments we found that the increase of inter-keystroke intervals (IKIs) was highly significant at positions that where either exclusively syllable (S) boundaries or combined syllable and morpheme (SM) boundaries. SM type IKIs are significantly larger than S type IKIs and are influenced by word frequencies, indicating lexical dependencies. SM type IKIs were found to be significantly longer for oral than for visual word presentation. This is taken as an indication that additional processes (phonological-graphemic mediation) are involved in the accessing of graphemic word forms when words are presented aurally. The fact that pseudo-words are also written with increased IKIs at syllable borders indicates that at least one major component of the S-type IKIs is produced by bypassing the lexicon, probably at sublexical levels. The fact that augmented SM and S type IKIs are also found in the delayed typing task indicates that input into the motor system is constituted by sub-word units instead by fully specified words. As SM and S type IKIs reflect influences of different ..

Grammatical planning, execution, and control in written sentence production

Nottbusch G. Grammatical planning, execution, and control in written sentence production. READING AND WRITING. 2010;23(7):777-801.In this study participants were asked to describe pictured events in one type-written sentence, containing one of two different syntactic structures (subordinated vs. coordinated subject noun phrases). According to the hypothesis, the larger subordinated structure (one noun phrase including a second, subordinated, one) should be cognitively more costly and will be planned before the start of the production, whereas the coordinated structure, consisting of two syntactically equal noun phrases, can be planned locally in an incremental fashion. The hypothesis was confirmed by the analysis of the word-initial keystroke latencies as well as the eye movements towards the stimulus, indicating a stronger tendency to incremental planning in case of the coordinated structure

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217–236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output