On Factors Influencing Typing Time: Insights from a Viral Online Typing Game

Context effects in human spoken language are well-documented and play a central role in the theory of language production. However, the role of context in written language production is far less well understood, even though a considerable proportion of the language produced by many people today is written. Here we analyze the factors predictive of English language typing times in a large, naturalistic corpus from the popular TypeRacer.com website. We find broad consistency with the major documented effects of linguistic context on spoken language production, suggesting potential modality-independence in the cognitive mechanisms underlying language production and/or similar optimization pressures on the production systems in both modalities