Movement Analysis of Repetitive Writing Behaviour of First, Second and Third Grade Primary School Children

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the movement analysis of the repetitive writing behavior of the first-, second-, and third-grade primary school children. The analysis of differences in writing performances among the first-, second-, and third-grade primary-school children brought up evidence for a nonmonotonic development of performance. Children profit from rehearsal and follow a more piecemeal strategy in the production of strokes. Long writing patterns lead to the investment of more effort than short writing patterns, thereby resulting in a faster writing performance. Adults, however, perceive and perform the task as a whole. For adults, longer patterns lead to more complex retrieval and unpacking processes than shorter ones, thereby resulting in a slower writing performance in longer patterns. Writing with discrete stops at a stroke transition point entails the specific difficulty of preparing that stop during the execution of the ongoing stroke. Writing short sequences of strokes with discrete stops leads to longer reaction times than would be expected from the limited length of the sequence itself. Thus, preparing a stop could have counterbalanced the higher complexity of continuous writing patterns. The direction of a rotation of continuous repetitive writing patterns also influences the performance measures and the quality of stroke production.