Spelling processing during handwriting and typing and the role of reading and visual-motor skills when typing is less practiced than handwriting

The automatization of handwriting and typing is sustained by both sensorimotor and linguistic abilities that support the integration of central-linguistic processes with modality-specific peripheral-motor programs. How this integration evolves when handwriting and, especially, typing is not fully automatized has not been well-understood yet. In the present work, we had two main aims: (1) to understand how spelling processing affects handwriting and typing word production in a sample of 9th-grade Italian students who have extensive handwriting practice but less experience with typing, and (2) to unveil if reading and visual-motor integration skills of the writer/typists have a role in integrating spelling processing and motor execution. Thirty-six 9th-grade participants handwrote and typed to dictation words and pseudowords of different lengths and orthographic complexity. To test spelling processing during handwriting and typing, we collected measures of latency (RTs)—i.e. the interval between spoken stimulus availability and starting to write—, of interletter interval mean—i.e., the mean of the intervals between consecutive letters—, and whole response duration—i.e. the execution time of the entire stimulus. We further assessed participants’ reading and visual-motor integration skills to analyze their impact on the chronometric measures as a function of the linguistic proprieties of the stimuli. Our findings show a different pattern of processing for handwriting, the automatized process for our participants, and for typing, for which stronger lexical and sublexical effects emerged. Furthermore, reading and visual-motor skills interacted differently with the two transcription modalities unveiling a modality-specific role of individual skills according to the automatization of handwriting and typing.