The role of visual feedback in supervision of grammatical spelling

Native French speakers (N = 24; M age = 20.1 yr.) were orally presented with sentences they were asked to write on a digitizing tablet, either with full visual feedback or with no visual feedback. The study assessed the extent to which the visual feedback contributed to supervising of verbal agreement processes, either postgraphically (detecting and revising any error that has been produced) or pregraphically (checking the graphemic plan before it is transcribed). The proportion of erroneous agreements was smaller with visual feedback (7%) than without (14%). The proportion of erroneous agreements that were spontaneously corrected was much higher with visual feedback (34%) than without (0%). There were significantly more pauses right before or within the transcription of the verbal inflection with visual feedback (8%) than without (3%).