“Twisting fingers”: The case for interactivity in typed language production

Abstract

Despite the obvious linguistic nature of typing, current psychological models of typing are, to a large extent, divorced from models of spoken language production. This gap has left unanswered many questions regarding the cognitive architecture of typing. In this article we advocate the use of a psycholinguistic framework for studying typing, by showing that such a framework could reveal important similarities and differences between spoken and typed production. Specifically, we investigated the interaction between the lexical and postlexical layers by using a phenomenon known in spoken production as the "repeated-phoneme effect." Participants typed four-word sequences of "finger-twisters" (equivalent to tongue-twisters in spoken production), in which the vowel in the last two words was either repeated (e.g., "fog top") or not (e.g., "fog tip"). We found reliably more migration errors between the consonants of the two typed words when the vowel was repeated, even after the effect of phonology was accounted for. This finding is compatible with an interactive typing system in which postlexical representations send feedback to lexical representations and reveals similar dynamics between spoken and typed production. Additional analyses showed further similarities to spoken production, such as distinct lexical and postlexical error categories, but also revealed that typing errors were much more likely than spoken errors to violate phonotactic constraints. These results provide the first demonstration of feedback between the postlexical and lexical layers in typing, and more generally demonstrate the utility of adopting a psycholinguistic framework tailored specifically to the study of typing.

Errors in Imagined and Executed Typing

“…In spoken language, similar errors may occur for different reasons [44]. For example, an interchange error may occur due to permutation of the motor commands [29] or due to phonological similarity of two phonemes [44]. We cannot rule out the possibility that covert speech contributed to some typing errors.…”

“…It also has to be noted that different authors provide different reasons for the occurrence of some errors [28,29,44]. The classification that we adopted was based on the literature on copy typing [28,29].…”

“…The classification that we adopted was based on the literature on copy typing [28,29]. In spoken language, similar errors may occur for different reasons [44]. For example, an interchange error may occur due to permutation of the motor commands [29] or due to phonological similarity of two phonemes [44].…”

A Comprehension- or a Production-Based Monitor? Response to Roelofs (2020)

“…It is not impossible to imagine that activation, instead of directly feeding back from phonemes to lexical items, would travel all the way to perceptual representations, and then back to the same lexical items (see below for a similar proposal in Roelofs, this issue), and hence involved the perceptual system. But one must wonder why such a delay is necessary or plausible given the strong empirical evidence in favor of feedback within the production system in all production modalities ( Dell, 1986 ; Pinet & Nozari, 2018 ; Rapp & Goldrick, 2000 ).…”

A comprehension- or a production-based monitor? Response to Roelofs (2019)

“…It is not impossible to imagine that activation, instead of directly feeding back from phonemes to lexical items, would travel all the way to perceptual representatoins, and then back to the same lexical items (see below for a similar proposal in Roelofs, this issue), and hence involved the perceptual system. But one must wonder why such a delay is necessary or plausible given the strong empirical evidence in favor of feedback within the production system in all production modalities (Dell, 1986;Pinet & Nozari, 2018;Rapp & Goldrick, 2000).…”