Syllabic structures in typing: Evidence from hearing-impaired writers

This paper contributes to the ongoing controversy on the nature of syllabic structures in writing. Our evidence comes from a modified version of the continuous typing paradigm (e.g. Shaffer 1978) as proposed by Will et al. (submitted). Based on experiments on written word and nonword production, we show that, both prelingually hearing-impaired and hearing writers group their graphemic output in syllable-like units in a very similar fashion. Furthermore, this timing pattern appears to be independent of whether the input is a real word or pseudoword. As the hearing-impaired are impoverished with respect to spoken language phonology, we conclude that the syllabic units are not crucially dependent on experience with spoken language. Instead, we argue that 1) grapho-syllables are abstract entities, and 2) that the application of syllabic principles is a modespecific postlexical mechanism. keywords: hearing-impaired, syllable, grapho-syllable, ortho-syllable, writing, typing abbreviations: IKI = InterKey Interval (the time between successive keystrokes)