Advance planning of form properties in the written production of single and multiple words

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the scope of advance planning in written production. Experiment 1 manipulated phonological factors in single word written production, and Experiments 2 and 3 did the same in the production of adjective-noun utterances. In all three experiments, effects on latencies were found which mirrored those previously documented with spoken responses, and are taken to suggest that writers planned the entire utterance before initiating a response. Additionally, response durations were measured, and these provided further support for the complete planning assumption. The results suggest that writers, like speakers, plan utterances of at least two words in their entirety before initiating a response.

Keywords:

• Language production
• Handwriting
• Planning

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant RES-062-23-0729 from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to the authors, as well as grant BB/C508477/1 from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to the first author.

Notes

¹An alternative scenario that could account for an effect of semantic or phonological manipulations on response execution would postulate that response selection and execution are ‘staged’, but both draw on a common pool of resources. Because the data reported below show no evidence for an effect on durations, we will not expand this issue further.

²It is worth mentioning that Delattre, Bonin and Barry (2006) recently used response latencies and durations in a written spelling-to-dictation task to investigate the effects of sound-to-spelling regularity, with a research logic very similar to the one pursued in the current article.