Typing Performance as a Function of Text

Abstract

The performance of skilled typists was examined on texts ranging from prose to random letters, with the aim of discovering some of the factors that support its fluency. It was found that speed and errors were the same for prose and random word texts, and although performance got progressively worse on more degraded texts the biggest decline came between first- and zero-order random letter texts. The results were discussed in the context of several hypotheses about transcription processes, some assuming a statistical, left-to-right encoding of letters and others assuming linguistic encoding, either preserving the linguistic units in response units or translating the linguistic units into letter responses under the control of a sequencing process.