The interaction between central and peripheral processes in handwriting production

Written production studies investigating central processing have ignored research on the peripheral components of movement execution, and vice versa. This study attempts to integrate both approaches and provide evidence that central and peripheral processes interact during word production. French participants wrote regular words (e.g. FORME), irregular words (e.g. FEMME) and pseudo-words (e.g. FARNE) on a digitiser. Pseudo-words yielded longer latencies than regular words. Letter durations were greater for words at earlier letter positions and greater for pseudo-words at the later positions. Letter durations were longer for irregular than regular words. The effect was modulated by the position of the irregularity. These findings indicate that movement production can be affected by lexical and sublexical variables that regulate spelling processes. They suggest that central processing is not completely finished before movement initiation and affects peripheral writing mechanisms in a cascaded manner. Lexical and sublexical processing does not cascade to the same extent.