Measuring and Assessing Typing Skills in Writing Research

In keyboard writing, typing skills are considered an important prerequisite of proficient text production. We describe the design, implementation, and application a standardized copy-typing task in order to measure assess individual fluency. A test-retest analysis indicates instrument’s reliability. While has been developed across eleven different languages related layouts, we here refer corpus Dutch copy tasks (n = 1682). Analyses show that copying speed non-linearly varies with age. Bayesian analyses reveal differences performance underlying distributions inter-key intervals between components (e.g., lexical vs. non-lexical materials; high-frequent lowfrequent bigrams). Based on these findings it is strongly recommended include copy-task measures keystroke logging data writing studies. This supports better comparability interpretability from more complex or communicatively-embedded individuals. Further potential applications for research explained discussed.