Phonological and orthographic demands in the production of handwriting

In an experimental handwriting task, with two parts, we varied the phonological and orthographic complexity of visually presented nonwords. Twelve adult subjects had to write these nonwords in shorthand as well as in Latin script. Phonological complexity was varied by presenting a nonword which included two identical vowel characters. These were either phonologically similar (simple condition) or phonologically different (complex condition). Orthographic complexity was varied by using nonwords which either have a graphemic format for shorthand that corresponds with the graphemic format that is applied for Latin script (simple condition) or a graphemic format for shorthand which is discrepant from the Latin script format (complex condition). It appeared that a higher degree of phonological and orthographic complexity led to a slower and less fluent performance in graphemes that preceded the actual locus of complexity of the nonword. Furthermore, complexity effects were by far the strongest under the production of shorthand. The results are interpreted from the point of view of a psychomotor theory of handwriting, which assumes that the spelling process of visually presented nonwords may follow a phonological or an orthographic (sublexical) route. The finding that orthographic complexity interferes with the production of a phonologically oriented task such as shorthand is interpreted as evidence in favour of an interactive transmission of information between these two processing routes.