Interword and intraword pause threshold in writing

Florence Chenu, François Pellegrino, Harriet Jisa, Michel Fayol

Writing words in real life involves setting objectives, imagining a recipient, translating ideas into linguistic forms, managing grapho-motor gestures, etc. Understanding writing requires observation of the processes as they occur in real time. Analysis of pauses is one of the preferred methods for accessing the dynamics of writing and is based on the idea that pauses are behavioral correlates of cognitive processes. However, there is a need to clarify what we are observing when studying pause phenomena, as we will argue in the first section. This taken into account, the study of pause phenomena can be considered following two approaches. A first approach, driven by temporality, would define a threshold and observe where pauses, e.g., scriptural inactivity occurs. A second approach, linguistically driven, would define structural units and look for scriptural inactivity at the boundaries of these units or within these units. Taking a temporally driven approach, we present two methods which aim at the automatic identification of scriptural inactivity which is most likely not attributable to grapho-motor management in texts written by children and adolescents using digitizing tablets in association with Eye and Pen (©) (Chesnet and Alamargot, 2005). The first method is purely statistical and is based on the idea that the distribution of pauses exhibits different Gaussian components each of them corresponding to a different type of pause. After having reviewed the limits of this statistical method, we present a second method based on writing dynamics which attempts to identify breaking points in the writing dynamics rather than relying only on pause duration. This second method needs to be refined to overcome the fact that calculation is impossible when there is insufficient data which is often the case when working with young scriptors.