The Elementary Units of Programming in Handwriting

Publisher Summary posited by Sternberg, Knoll, Monsell, and Wright to be a stress group in speech production and a key stroke in typing. This chapter presents a series of experiments that attempts to create conditions so that the effects upon RT and duration per unit may be observed in simple handwriting tasks. To encourage motor programming, well-trained subjects were required to perform simple handwriting sequences in a very short time. The writing sequences chosen for the experiments were patterns of repetitive up-and-down strokes so that these short units may form production units of a motor program. Results suggested that the main distinction of writing production was that the more or less orthogonal movement components involved in the writing process limited the speed of writing movements. The experimental results also suggested that either the down stroke or the unidirectional stroke was the more likely production unit, thereby indicating the possibility that the actual units varied according to the form of the writing output.