Writing dictated words and picture names: Syllabic boundaries affect execution in Spanish

Álvarez, Carlos J.; Cottrell, David; Afonso, Olivia

doi:10.1017/s0142716409090092

Cited by 50 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This appears quite clearly in the duration of the letter that is located before the grapheme. This pattern of results is in line with the idea that central and peripheral processes function in a cascaded fashion (Álvarez et al, 2009;Delattre, Bonin, & Barry, 2006;Kandel, Spinelli, Guerassimovitch, & Ál-varez, 2010). In other words, grapheme processing starts before the processing of the motor parameters required to produce the grapheme itself and cascades into the processes that regulate the local aspects of letter production at the first letter of the grapheme.…”

Section: Author Notesupporting

confidence: 85%

“…Before the presentation of the word, there was an auditory signal that indicated the beginning of the trial and a fixation point for 200 msec. As in previous studies on adult handwriting production, the participants had to write the words in uppercase letters and lift the pen between each letter in a small wrist upward-downward movement (Álvarez et al, 2009;Bogaerts, Meulenbroek, & Thomassen, 1996;Kandel, Álvarez, & Vallée, 2006. The reason for the uppercase letters instruction is that, unlike cursive handwriting, the beginning and end of the letters are very clear.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following the anticipatory rationale of Van Galen's (1991) handwriting model, grapheme units should be activated before the execution of the movement to produce its first letter. This activation should spread in a "cascaded" fashion, in parallel with the processing of lower levels that control local parameters, such as size or stroke direction accounted for in terms of reading processes-the visual presentation of the word on the screen-because this kind of syllable effect also appeared with written picture naming and dictation tasks (Álvarez, Cottrell, & Afonso Hernández, 2009). …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Processing complex graphemes in handwriting production

Kandel

Spinelli

2010

Memory & Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

762Many studies of handwriting production implicitly or explicitly assume that writing a word consists merely of producing one letter after the other. For this reason, Van Galen's (1991) model of handwriting production postulated that we memorize and recall the spelling of words as abstract linear sequences that exclusively encode information on letter identity and order. The handwriting system would activate the orthographic representations of words such as set and sea as S 1 E 2 T 3 and S 1 E 2 A 3 and would provide these linear strings as inputs to the motor modules that deal with the programming of the movements needed to write them. According to this rationale, the timing of the production of E 2 should be equivalent for the two words, because they have the same identity and order. In a different perspective, the way we produce the movements to write E 2 could depend on the linguistic status of the letter chunk in which it is embedded. In sea, E 2 cannot be dissociated from a, because it belongs to a specific ea letter chunk that represents the phoneme / /. E 2 in set simply represents the phoneme / /. This tendency to group small units into bigger chunks is a well-known phenomenon that is particularly efficient for memorization (cf. Jenkins & Russel, 1952). The idea that, in writing processes, we recover the spelling of words by activating letter chunks is therefore quite appealing. The goal of this study was to provide evidence that the timing of the production of E 2 in set and sea should be different, because in set there is a one-to-one relationship between phonemes and letters, whereas in sea, this relationship is not straightforward and is more complex. If we generate letter chunks that represent phonemes, we could optimize the recall of spelling in a more linguistically oriented fashion.When a letter represents a phoneme, it is referred to as a grapheme. Coltheart (1978) defined graphemes as the written representation of phonemes. One-letter graphemes such as E 2 in set are simple graphemes, and letter chunks such as EA in sea are complex graphemes. So, to write sea-a three-letter but two-grapheme word-we should activate S 1 EA 2 and then "unwrap" the EA chunk into E and A for serial production. This conception of handwriting supposes that orthographic representations would not consist merely of linear letter strings encoding information on letter identity and order. They could be multilevel structures that encode information on letter chunks that obey phonological coherence.This idea is not new and was introduced by Caramazza and Miceli in 1990 on the basis of neuropsychological data. These authors presented a case study of an Italian 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 ...

show abstract

Section: Author Notesupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Processing complex graphemes in handwriting production

Kandel

Spinelli

2010

Memory & Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In other words, handwriting gestures are programmed in accordance with the syllabic structure of words. This syllabic effect was replicated with French words of different syllable lengths written in cursive letters and a different experimental paradigm (Lambert, Kandel, Fayol, & Espéret, 2008) as well as in Spanish with written picture naming and dictation tasks (Á lvarez, Cottrell, & Afonso, 2009).…”

mentioning

confidence: 76%

A longitudinal study of handwriting skills in pre-schoolers: the acquisition of syllable oriented programming strategies

Vilageliú

Kandel

2010

Read Writ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous studies have shown the relevance of the syllable as a programming unit in handwriting production, both in adults and elementary school children. This longitudinal study focuses on the acquisition of writing skills in a group of preschoolers. It examines how and when the syllable structure of the word starts regulating motor programming in handwriting. Eighteen five year old preschoolers copied six-letter Catalan words (disyllabic and trisyllabic) on a digitiser at three different times over the academic year (January, March, and May). The words were written in uppercase letters. We measured the duration of the inter-letter intervals (ILI) to gather information on the timing of motor programming. The results indicated that from January to March the children were mostly focused on movement proficiency. The results also showed different profiles of ILI duration for the two types of words over the three sessions. For disyllabic words, the syllable regulated movement programming in January; for trisyllabic words, this happened in March. This suggests that the syllable already plays a role in the programming of handwriting movements in kindergarten.

show abstract

“…However, there are recent handwriting data on the role of syllable-sized chunking showing a syllabic effect both with a task involving visual input (Kandel, Á lvarez, & Vallée, 2006) and with written picture naming and dictation tasks (Á lvarez, Cottrell, & Afonso-Hernández, 2009) suggesting that the effects found in handwriting may not be accounted for in terms of reading processes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%