The role of linguistics for the speed of handwriting movements : Effects of spelling uncertainty

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the application of a grammatical rule on a movement time of handwriting. Eight adult subjects participated in the experiment : they had to listen to a sentence in French and then they were required to write out one of the words contained in the sentence. Among these words were four pairs of words which were both homographic and homophonic. In each pair one of the words was an invariant word. The spelling of the other word of the pair depended on the application of a grammatical rule. The results showed that this additional linguistic load entailed an increase in reaction time as well as in movement time. This effect only appeared during the first trials. Therefore, these results show that the applicaton of a grammatical rule to solve the instances of spelling uncertainty has an effect on the initiation as well as on the execution of a handwriting task