About this Research Topic
Writing is an essential communication tool for living in society, but currently, very little is known on how we write words, and most research on language production has been devoted to speech.
Writing spans from the moment we intend to deliver a linguistic message to the moment we actually execute a complex movement with a pen (or a keyboard). It therefore involves extremely diverse levels of processing. As a consequence, research on writing is approached in very different ways according to the nature of what is being written: text, paragraph, sentence, word, letter, stroke... and distinct models have been proposed to describe the mechanisms underlying these processing levels. Another related consequence is that writing studies involve various but clearly separated scientific communities: cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, movement sciences, educational sciences, and neuroscience and brain imaging. We are convinced that the lack of communication between these approaches harms the progress in writing research.
So the aim of this research topic is to bring together contributions related to writing from a wide range of domains to provide scientists interested in behavioural and neural correlates of language and/or motor control with a more integrated and interactive view. All investigations examining writing processes ˗from cognitive (e.g., spelling recall and lexical access) to motor (e.g. control of letter size or wrist rotation)˗ and their neural correlates are welcome to propose original data, opinions or methods. Contributions considering possible interactions between levels of processing, or addressing a given level with a pluridisciplinary approach, are especially welcome. We are also concerned with questions related to writing disabilities, the relationship between writing and speech production, motor-perceptual interactions and educational research investigating the precursors of writing such as phonological awareness, motor maturation, or visuo-spatial skills.
Writing spans from the moment we intend to deliver a linguistic message to the moment we actually execute a complex movement with a pen (or a keyboard). It therefore involves extremely diverse levels of processing. As a consequence, research on writing is approached in very different ways according to the nature of what is being written: text, paragraph, sentence, word, letter, stroke... and distinct models have been proposed to describe the mechanisms underlying these processing levels. Another related consequence is that writing studies involve various but clearly separated scientific communities: cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, movement sciences, educational sciences, and neuroscience and brain imaging. We are convinced that the lack of communication between these approaches harms the progress in writing research.
So the aim of this research topic is to bring together contributions related to writing from a wide range of domains to provide scientists interested in behavioural and neural correlates of language and/or motor control with a more integrated and interactive view. All investigations examining writing processes ˗from cognitive (e.g., spelling recall and lexical access) to motor (e.g. control of letter size or wrist rotation)˗ and their neural correlates are welcome to propose original data, opinions or methods. Contributions considering possible interactions between levels of processing, or addressing a given level with a pluridisciplinary approach, are especially welcome. We are also concerned with questions related to writing disabilities, the relationship between writing and speech production, motor-perceptual interactions and educational research investigating the precursors of writing such as phonological awareness, motor maturation, or visuo-spatial skills.
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