Multiple spans in transcription typing.

Abstract

Transcription typing has been postulated to consist of four components involving (a) input of chunks from the source text, (b) parang of the chunks into discrete characters, (c) translation of the characters into movement specifications, and then (d) execution of those specifications in the form of keystroke responses. This multicomponent perspective on typing implies that it should be possible to identify distinct measures of anticipatory processing that correspond to the different processing components or spans. This prediction was tested, and largely confirmed, in three studies in which typists were administered a variety of experimental tasks to obtain span measures corresponding to the extent of anticipatory processing in different components of typing. As expected, the spans became progressively smaller as the hypothesized processing moved from i&put (with an average span ofS.l characters) to execution (with an average span of only 1.4 characters).