Variations of chronometric measures of written production depending on clause packaging

Abstract

A crucial way of revealing cognitive process at work during language use is by studying the temporal characteristics of language production. During written text production, the writer engages in many cognitive processes, such as planning, translating or reviewing (Hayes & Flower 1980). S/He has to write sentences and clauses which are linked, in order to constitute a coherent discourse. In our study, thirty undergraduate French students were asked to continue a fictive story. The text was written on a graphic tablet, connected to a computer. The Eye&Pen software (Chesnet & Alamargot 2005) was used to provide chronometric measures, such as the initial pause of each word. We hypothesized that the clause initial pause would depend on the degree of dependence between clauses: the more dependent the clause is, the shorter the initial pause would be. Results corroborate this hypothesis: the initial pause duration is affected by the clause type, suggesting that subordinated clauses start to be planned at the beginning of the matrix clause. A similar result was obtained when the clause required planning at the semantic level: pauses are shorter before restrictive relatives than before explicatives. We argue that the long pauses at the beginning of sentences can be explained by the planning of several dependent clauses.

Keywords

• writing
• text
• pauses
• planning
• clauses