"Twisting fingers": The case for interactivity in typed language production

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Current psychological models of typing are largely separate from spoken language production models.
• This disconnect leaves questions about the cognitive architecture of typing unanswered.
• A psycholinguistic framework can illuminate similarities and differences between spoken and typed language production.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the interaction between lexical and postlexical layers in typing.
• To adapt the "repeated-phoneme effect" from spoken production to the study of typing.
• To demonstrate the utility of a psycholinguistic approach for understanding typing cognition.

Main Methods:

• Participants typed four-word "finger-twisters" with repeated or non-repeated vowels in the final two words.
• The "repeated-phoneme effect" was examined by analyzing consonant migration errors.
• Phonological influences on errors were statistically controlled.

Main Results:

• Significantly more consonant migration errors occurred between words when the intervening vowel was repeated.
• This effect persisted even after accounting for phonological factors.
• Typing errors were more likely to violate phonotactic constraints compared to spoken errors.

Conclusions:

• The findings support an interactive typing system with feedback from postlexical to lexical representations.
• Typing exhibits similar cognitive dynamics to spoken language production.
• This study demonstrates feedback between postlexical and lexical layers in typing for the first time.