Capturing writers’ typing while visually attending the emerging text: a methodological approach

Abstract Knowledge about writers’ eye movements and their effects on the writing process, and its product—the finally edited text—is still limited. Previous research has demonstrated that there are differences between reading texts written by someone else and reading one’s own emerging text and that writers frequently look back into their own texts (Torrance et al. in Psychol Res Psychologische Forschung 80(5):729–743, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0683-8 ). For handwriting, Alamargot et al. (Writing and cognition: research and applications. Elsevier Science, pp 13–29, 2007) found support that these lookbacks could occur in parallel with transcription, but to our knowledge this type of parallel processing has not been explored further, and definitely not in the context of computer writing. Considering that language production models are moving away from previous sequential or serial models (e.g., Levelt in Speaking from intentions to articulation. MIT Press, 1989) towards models in which linguistic processes can operate in parallel (Olive in J Writ Res, 2014. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2014.06.02.4 ), this is slightly surprising. In the present paper, we introduce a methodological approach to examine writers’ parallel processing in which we take our point of departure in visual attention rather than in the keystrokes. Capitalizing on New ScriptLog’s feature to link gaze with typing across different functional units in the writing task, we introduce and describe a method to capture and examine sequences of typing during fixations, outline how these can be examined in relation to each other, and test our approach by exploring typing during fixations in a text composition task with 14 competent adult writers.