The Neural Basis of Typewriting: A Functional MRI Study

Abstract

To investigate the neural substrate of typewriting Japanese words and to detect the difference between the neural substrate of typewriting and handwriting, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in 16 healthy volunteers. All subjects were skillful touch typists and performed five tasks: a typing task, a writing task, a reading task, and two control tasks. Three brain regions were activated during both the typing and the writing tasks: the left superior parietal lobule, the left supramarginal gyrus, and the left premotor cortex close to Exner’s area. Although typing and writing involved common brain regions, direct comparison between the typing and the writing task revealed greater left posteromedial intraparietal cortex activation in the typing task. In addition, activity in the left premotor cortex was more rostral in the typing task than in the writing task. These findings suggest that, although the brain circuits involved in Japanese typewriting are almost the same as those involved in handwriting, there are brain regions that are specific for typewriting.

Keyboarding Difficulties: Frequency and Characteristics among Higher Education Students with Handwriting Difficulties

“…Our results also showed that students in the HDKD group had lower scores in linguistic functions (including phonological decoding and morpho‐orthographic knowledge) compared to students in the HD‐only group. These results are not surprising, because at the initial stages, handwriting and keyboarding share linguistic skills (Higashiyama et al., 2015); thus, deficits in these linguistic functions may result in both handwriting and keyboarding difficulties.…”

“…In addition, given the fact that transcription skills require attention and motor functions, it is surprising that students with HDKD did not significantly differ from the students with HD alone in attention functions or sensory–fine–motor skills, specifically in the Finger Succession test, measuring kinesthetic abilities. A possible explanation for these results is that the behavioral measures underlying the handwriting execution process are different from those of keyboarding (Higashiyama et al., 2015), and need to be measured differently (i.e., via different tests). This finding was noted in previous studies (Preminger et al., 2004; Weintraub, Gilmour‐Grill, & Weiss, 2010) showing that among both elementary‐school students and young adults, handwriting and keyboarding skills vary in underlying perceptual and motor skills.…”

“…Transcription skills, including handwriting and keyboarding, are both processes in which internal language is translated into external written symbols (Berninger, Abbott, Augsburger, & Garcia, 2009). Both require similar linguistic processes, including accessing phonological, morphological, orthographic, and semantic knowledge (Feng et al., 2019; Higashiyama, Takeda, Someya, Kuroiwa, & Tanaka, 2015). The processes of handwriting and keyboarding diverge at the stage of converting internal writing symbols (i.e., the allographs) to motor programs for generating the external writing symbols.…”

Neural Signatures of the Reading-Writing Connection: Greater Involvement of Writing in Chinese Reading than English Reading

“…Exner’s area has traditionally been associated with a role in the generation of motor commands for handwritten letters [23,25,59]. It has been repeatedly found to be more activated for writing than reading (-22,-4, 50) in Purcell, 2011, and (-24,-16, 68) in [60]. This region is involved in both handwriting and typewriting [26,60], suggesting its importance for written language production rather than specific motor commands per se, and is sensitive to word-length in spelling [27], which is consistent with our finding that it is more involved in Chinese writing than in English writing due to more complex written output.…”

“…It has been repeatedly found to be more activated for writing than reading (-22,-4, 50) in Purcell, 2011, and (-24,-16, 68) in [60]. This region is involved in both handwriting and typewriting [26,60], suggesting its importance for written language production rather than specific motor commands per se, and is sensitive to word-length in spelling [27], which is consistent with our finding that it is more involved in Chinese writing than in English writing due to more complex written output. However recent work on stroke patients suggests that it may also have a role as a graphic buffer, a working memory component of the spelling system that temporarily holds the sequence of graphemes during production of letter names for oral spelling or letter shapes for written spelling [61].…”