Lexical and Frequency Effects on Keystroke Timing: Challenges to a Lexical Search Account from a Type-To-Copy Task

Abstract

We explore how timing in identical keystroke sequences that form a stem morpheme are influenced by linguistic knowledge by manipulating lexical status and morphological complexity of words in a type-to-copy task. Starting from the second keystroke, we find that average keystroke latency within a stem morpheme varies according to whole-word frequency (Experiment 1) and lexicality defined by compatibility of the upcoming suffix (e.g., IZE vs IST) with the stem (e.g., NORMAL) that forms the target string (e.g., RENORMALIZE vs. RENORMAL; RENORMALIZE vs. RENORMALIST in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively). Further, although lexical and frequency effects persist over the string as a whole, non-linear mixed-effects regressions reveal position varying lexical effects on keystroke latencies within the stem morpheme. In addition, whole word frequency effects on the first keystroke were present. These results challenge hierarchical accounts of production with modular motor programs where the same letter sequence (for a morpheme) is realized independently of and only after lexical access to the full word in which the letters occur (cf. Crump and Logan, 2010a; Logan and Crump, 2011).