Pushing typists back on the learning curve: contributions of multiple linguistic units in the acquisition of typing skill

The present study investigated the way people acquire and control skilled performance in the context of typewriting. Typing skill was degraded by changing the location of a key (target key) while retaining the locations of other keys to disable an association between the letter and the key. We conducted 4 experiments: Experiment 1 demonstrated that disabling a letter-key association affected not only the execution of the target keystroke but also the planning of other keystrokes for words involving the target key. In Experiments 2-4, typists practiced with a new target location and then transferred to a condition in which they typed the practiced words with the original key location (Experiment 2) or typed new words with the practiced key location (Experiments 3 and 4). Experiment 2 showed that the newly acquired letter-key association interfered with the execution of the original keystroke but not planning. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that acquisition of the new letter-key association depended on multiple levels of linguistic units. Experiment 4 demonstrated that acquisition of the new association depended on sequences both before and after the target keystroke. We discuss implications of the results for 2 prominent approaches to modeling sequential behavior: hierarchical control and recurrent network models.