Pause behaviour among multilingual writers as a window for individual writing strategies

Writing comprises the interplay between active writing and pauses. The distribution of pauses is connected to the cognitive processes underlying writing. These processes are visible through variation in the pause duration, the linguistic context in which they occur, and their location in a given writing session, which we consider as facets that represent an individual writing strategy. We combine supervised machine learning and keystroke logging to analyse the degree to which the pause behaviour of multilingual writers can be accounted for by their typing skills or the remaining inter-writer variation, a possible indication of intentional agentive acts, and how these individual differences are conditioned by the language written and whether it is the writer’s first language. We focus on two languages, Finnish and Swedish, and the data include 50 recorded writing sessions: two recorded sessions from 25 participants, one in each language (17 L1-Finnish and 8 L1-Swedish). Our results suggest that individual variation is central but that the role depends on the facet of representation: Pause duration and location are more sensitive to individual variation than linguistic contexts. Regarding individual variation, typing skills and other inter-writer variation both contribute, and sometimes even typing skills seem linked to the intentional choices.