Writing and Typing Production
Written production studies how writers and typists translate ideas into orthographic output, from high-level planning down to letter and keystroke execution.
Definition
The cognitive and motor processes by which language is produced in written or typed form, spanning composition, spelling, and output execution.
Scope
This topic covers cognitive models of the writing process (planning, translating, reviewing), the retrieval and short-term holding of spellings (the graphemic buffer), and the motor execution of handwriting and skilled typing. It describes the processing architecture of written production rather than offering writing instruction.
Core questions
- What component processes make up the act of writing?
- How are word spellings retrieved and held during output?
- How is skilled typing controlled at the level of words and keystrokes?
Key concepts
- planning, translating, reviewing
- graphemic buffer
- orthographic output lexicon
- outer and inner loops
- keystroke dynamics
Key theories
- Cognitive process model of writing
- Hayes and Flower's model framing writing as recursive planning, translating, and reviewing processes operating within a task environment and the writer's long-term memory.
- Graphemic buffer in spelling
- Caramazza and colleagues' evidence from acquired dysgraphia for a short-term store that holds a word's letter sequence during written or oral spelling.
- Hierarchical control of typing
- Logan and Crump's account in which an outer loop generates words and an inner loop translates them into keystrokes, explaining dissociations in typing performance.
History
Hayes and Flower's 1980 process model shaped writing research, while neuropsychological studies of dysgraphia in the 1980s established components such as the graphemic buffer, and later work modeled the control of skilled typing.
Debates
- Shared versus separate output systems
- How far written and spoken production draw on shared central representations versus distinct output processes specific to writing and typing.
Key figures
- John Hayes
- Linda Flower
- Alfonso Caramazza
- Gordon Logan
Related topics
Seminal works
- hayesflower1980
- caramazza1987
- logancrump2011
Frequently asked questions
- What is the graphemic buffer?
- It is a short-term working store that holds the sequence of letters of a word while it is being written or spelled aloud; damage to it produces length-dependent spelling errors.