Abstract
Recent studies on handwriting production and neuropsychological data have suggested that orthographic representations are multilevel structures that encode information on letter identity and order, but also on intermediate-grained processing units such as syllables and morphemes. This study on handwriting production examined whether orthographic representations also include a graphemic-processing level. French adults wrote words containing an embedded one-, two-, or three-letter grapheme (e.g., a in clavier, ai in prairie, ain in plainte) on a digitizer. The results for letter duration revealed that the timing of movement processing depends on grapheme length (e.g., the duration of a for one-letter graphemes was shorter than that for two-letter graphemes, which, in turn, was shorter than that for three-letter graphemes). Two- and three-letter graphemes start to be processed before we start to write them. The results therefore revealed that orthographic representations also encode information on grapheme complexity.
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This research was supported by a grant from the Région Rhône-Alpes (Cluster Handicap, Viellissement et Neurosciences) to S.K.
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Kandel, S., Spinelli, E. Processing complex graphemes in handwriting production. Memory & Cognition 38, 762–770 (2010). https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.6.762
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.6.762