"Can you use it in a sentence?": Establishing how word-production difficulties shape text formation

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Being able to communicate ideas in writing is a critical part of people's social and professional life. Underdeveloped literacy skills are likely to result in lower grades, diminished job prospects, and a lower quality of life. Yet over half a million UK adults have underdeveloped literacy skills which is more prevalent in groups from socio-economically deprived areas (Department for Education and Skills, 2007; PIAAC, 2013). My research will shape our understanding of how we communicate in writing, provides a foundation to isolate the needs of struggling writers, and hence will inform new ways how literacy difficulty in learners and struggling adults (with, for example, dyslexia) can be measured and how people with difficulty can be supported to provide equal opportunities for everyone. Even though we typically don't struggle to formulate a sentence in spoken conversation, struggling with word spelling can, literally, result in you forgetting what it was that you were going to say and how you were going to say it. This thinking is frequently advanced in the educationally-focussed writing literature. Surprisingly though, the evidence that this is the case - poor spellers often produce lower quality texts - is equivocal and explanations are limited.From a theoretical viewpoint, writing involves a cascade of mental processes that flows from our mind into our fingers. This cascade starts with an intended message, moves on to coming up with suitable words and a grammatically correct order, before finding the right spelling for these words, and finally outputting them onto paper or screen. When things are going well - when the writer knows what they want to say, has the vocabulary in which to say it, knows how the words are spelled, and has many hours practice at typing or handwriting - then this cascade permits remarkably fluent output. However, it is also relatively common for this smooth flow to be disrupted. This might happen, for example, when a writer struggles to remember the spelling for a word. This typically delays output or results in an incorrect word appearing on the screen. Arguably, neither of these are particularly serious issues. Much more serious is the possibility that spelling difficulty has knock-on effects for what we want to say and how we plan to put it. Anecdotally, at least, hesitating to output a word can, literally, result in you forgetting what it was that you were going to say.The proposed research will (a) advance our understanding of how we coordinate the mental processes that allow us to express meaning in writing, and (b) inform the hypothesis that struggling with word spelling negatively impacts on our ability to formulate ideas in writing by (c) explaining in what way spelling difficulty reduces text quality. The project aims will be achieved by (1) establishing whether a fundamental property of sentences, namely word order, is used to accommodate writing hesitations, (2) assessing whether the use of sentence syntax is a direct result of spelling difficulties, and (3) exploring how these processes differ in young adults with genuine spelling difficulty. To draw conclusions about these objectives the project will conduct three series of experimental studies: I will ask participants to describe simple arrangements of pictures and relate their keyboarding (what is typed when) and eye-movement behaviour (which pictures are people looking at when they type what) to gain insight into the timecourse of how we encode what we see in writing. These data will be analysed with cutting edge statistical models to understand under which conditions text formulation is directly impacted by difficulty with word spelling. The PI is in an exceptional position to conduct this work because he have pioneered the research methods to do this (Roeser et al., 2019; Roeser, De Maeyer et al., 2021).