Slips of the typewriter key

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of 500 submorphemic slips of the typewriter key that escaped the notice of authors and other proofreaders and thereby made their way into the published records of scientific research. Despite this high selectivity, the corpus is not found to differ in major ways from other collections of keying slips. The main characteristics of this error type include a predominance of within-word slips, an elevated rate of noncontextual slips, a heightened incidence of omissions (in particular, masking errors), a high number of adjacent switches, and an uncommonness of these slips in word edges. In all these respects, slips of the key resemble slips of the pen, although not slips of the tongue. It is argued that speech errors are shaped by a fully deployed structural representation, whereas key slips arise under the influence of a weak structural representation. By implication, speaking is characterized by a hierarchical strategy of activation while typewriting is subject to the so-called staircase strategy of serialization in which activation is a function of linear distance. These disparate strategies may be understood as a response of the processing system to disparate requirements, such as varying speed of execution.

Task-relevant chunking in sequence learning.

“…Examples of related ideas are Rumelhart and Norman's (1982) neural network model, in which the decision to type a word is associated with a unit corresponding to that word, which in turn activates each of the letters in the word. Likewise, van Galen (1991; see also Berg, 2002; Portier and van Galen, 1992) proposed a model of handwriting such that handwriting was assumed to be the result of several, hierarchically organized, processing modules, each of which corresponds to a different aspect of the handwriting process.…”

Comparing the cognate effect in spoken and written second language word production

“…Furthermore, the accuracy was lower and picture naming response latencies tended to be slower in typewriting. The lower accuracy for typewriting is not surprising, given that the incidence of typing errors on the word level is much higher in general compared to speech errors (see Berg, 2002). Slower reaction times were also found in and Baus, Strijkers, and Costa's (2013) study, who argued that this slowing is unlikely due to differences in the access of conceptual information between both modalities, but rather to the lower degree of automaticity of the typewriting process in comparison with speech.…”

“…In general, the spoken group committed more lexical errors (i.e., semantic errors and synonyms), but fewer sub-lexical errors (phonological/orthographic errors) in comparison with the written group. This indicates that writing is more vulnerable to interference of competing graphemes/phonemes compared to speech (see also Berg, 2002). Interestingly, the vulnerability to L1 interference (i.e., L1 translation-related errors) is similar in both modalities, which suggests that the activation of L1 is comparable during L2 speech and writing.…”

Are some morphological units more prone to spelling variation than others? A case study using spontaneous handwritten data

“…on what Th. Berg (2002) calls "slips of the typewriter key". Results that have been obtained on typewritten language cannot necessarily be transferred to handwriting in a simple way.…”