The role of phonological and suprasegmental codes in handwritten word production.
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Bristol
Department Name: Experimental Psychology
Abstract
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Organisations
Publications
Damian M
(2009)
Advance planning of form properties in the written production of single and multiple words
in Language and Cognitive Processes
Shen X
(2013)
Abstract graphemic representations support preparation of handwritten responses
in Journal of Memory and Language
Xingjia Shen (author)
(1900)
Role of phonology in hand written word production
Zhang Q
(2010)
Impact of phonology on the generation of handwritten responses: evidence from picture-word interference tasks.
in Memory & cognition
| Description | Handwriting is an important skill in literate societies. This project investigated two central theoretical issues, namely the extent to which handwriting is based on phonological (i.e., spoken) codes, and whether writing, which minimally requires knowledge about letters and their order, is additionally constrained by higher-level linguistic characteristics. The "implicit priming" (IP) task, widely used in research on spoken word production, was adopted to the investigation of writing. In the spoken domain, this task renders a benefit in naming times of response words resulting from word-initial overlapping form characteristics. Rather than articulating words, in our studies participants wrote down responses on a digital graphic tablet, and writing times were measured. We demonstrated that this method renders a robust benefit when response-word initial letters overlap. Additionally, the word-initial sound of the words appears irrelevant to whether a facilitation effect was obtained. This finding may imply that handwriting is not constrained by phonological variables, but given limited independent evidence supporting a role of phonology in writing, the IP task is probably not sensitive to such variables. We furthermore observed that priming in this task emerges from the planning of abstract graphemes (i.e., orthographic codes consisting of one or more letters which correspond to speech sounds). In combination, our studies demonstrate that handwriting is indeed constrained by higher-level properties such as graphemic structure, and that this constraint is not the result of a covert phonological influence but is indeed purely orthographical in nature. |
| Exploitation Route | The studies carried out within this project pioneered the use of a particular experimental paradigm adopted from research on spoken responses, for the exploration of handwritten output. The topics under investigation are currently of high interest to cognitive psychologists, and various research groups have adopted similar methods, including some in China. |
| Sectors | Education |
| Description | Our findings have to date not been used beyond basic research into the foundations of cognitive processing. |