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Researchers often decide on the number of trials included in an experiment without adhering to an empirical method or framework. This might compromise generalizability and unnecessarily increase participant burden. In this article we want to put forward generalizability theory as a guide for task reduction. We will use a sentence production task to demonstrate how a generalizability and a decision study can help researchers to estimate the minimum number of trials and of items per trial that are necessary to generalize over trials. We obtained writing process data for 116 participants. Each of them completed a sentence production task that had 40 trials. Pause times between and within all words, target nouns and target verbs were logged with the keystroke logging tool ScriptLog. Results demonstrate that generalizability theory can serve as an empirical framework to ensure generalizable measurements on the one hand, and reduce participant burden to a minimum on the other. This finding is particularly valuable for studies with vulnerable target groups, such as participants suffering from aphasia, dyslexia or Alzheimer's disease.

This article examines how master’s students consult and process sources in source-based writing tasks in L1 and L2. Two hundred eighty master’s students wrote a text in their L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) at the beginning and end of the academic year. They wrote these texts based on three sources: a report, a web text, and a newspaper article. Their writing processes were registered using the Inputlog keylogging program. This allowed us to determine how much time the students spent reading the sources, when they did so, which sources they consulted most frequently, and how often they switched between the various (types of) sources. The quality of the texts was assessed holistically using pairwise comparisons (D-pac). Confirmative factor analysis showed three components to be relevant to describe source use in L1 and L2 writing: (a) initial reading time, (b) interaction with sources, and (c) the degree of variance in source use throughout the writing process. Individual text quality remained stable in L1 and L2 throughout the academic year. Structural equation modeling showed that the approach in source use, especially source interaction, is correlated with text quality, but in L1 only.

In keyboard writing, typing skills are considered an important prerequisite of proficient text production. We describe the design, implementation, and application of a standardized copy-typing task in order to measure and assess individual typing fluency. A test-retest analysis indicates the instrument's reliability. While the task has been developed across eleven different languages and the related keyboard layouts, we here refer to a corpus of Dutch copy tasks (n = 1682). Analyses show that copying speed non-linearly varies with age. Bayesian analyses reveal differences in the typing performance and the underlying distributions of inter-key intervals between the different task components (e.g., lexical vs. non-lexical materials; high-frequent vs. low-frequent bigrams). Based on these findings it is strongly recommended to include copy-task measures in the analysis of keystroke logging data in writing studies. This supports a better comparability and interpretability of keystroke data from more complex or communicatively-embedded writing tasks across individuals. Further potential applications of the copy task for writing research are explained and discussed.

A reading-to-write task is a complex cognitive activity. The aim of this study is to gain insight into the difficulties that advanced learners of Spanish as a foreign language for professional communication purposes experience when they have to perform a reading-to-write task. This insight will help to improve writing instruction and training for this particular type of students. In this study, 19 students of a one-year master’s programme in multilingual professional communication (level B2–C1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, Council of Europe, 2001) were asked to carry out a reading-to-write task in Dutch, their mother tongue, and in Spanish at the beginning of the academic year. This task was repeated at the end of the academic year. On both occasions, the task was writing an informative synthesis of approximately 200–250 words using three digital source texts in Dutch and in Spanish pertaining to different text genres (i.e., a report from the European Union, a website, a newspaper article). The three source texts varied in lexical and syntactical complexity, content, style and discursive characteristics. All written products were evaluated by two independent raters. We found no general improvement in the reading-to-write task between the two moments, neither in the L1 nor in the L2. We did not find an improvement at sentence, text, or discourse level either. We will explore several explanations for this lack of improvement, based on theoretical models of foreign language acquisition and recent empirical writing research.

This baseline study aimed to create a coherent set of images that can be used to describe language decline found in healthy elderly and to compare this to the language change found in the early stages of Alzheimers disease. To this extend, a typed picture naming task was created, in which visual complexity, age-of-acquisition, frequency and name agreement were controlled for. 76 healthy elderly participated in the test; their data will be used in follow-up studies to compare with cognitively impaired patients. The entire typing process was logged with keystroke logging tools Inputlog and Scriptlog; the obtained results were analysed in light of the typing product (name agreement and object recognition) and the writing process (naming latencies and interkey latencies). Results showed that the latencies increased with age and that the older participants had longer latencies for images with a lower frequency and higher age-of-acquisition. Hence, our results indicate the need to take both the latencies and the typing product into consideration.

sVolume 35 no. 2 2013 Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - 35 (2013), nr. 2, 203-204 Peter Jan Schellens. Tone of Voice in Political Debates: A Stylistic and Ar-gumentative Analysis [This paper is a revised version of the fare-well lecture of Peter Jan Schellens as a Pro-fessor of Language and Communication at the Faculty of Arts of Radboud University Nijmegen on January 11, 2013.] The high tone of voice in Dutch public and parlia-mentary debates is frequently criticised. However, what do we mean with a high ‘tone of voice’? This contribution uses a case study on wildlife starvation from 2010 to answer this question from a stylistic and an argumentative perspective. The case re-solved around the question whether game-keepers should provide additional food to rescue starving wildlife in the Dutch nature reserve “The Oostvaardersplassen” or not. This issue was hotly debated in newspapers, on digital platforms, and in two parliamen-tary debates. The analysis of this debate re-veals that two pragmatic features contribute to a rising tone of voice. Firstly, debaters of-ten forcefully delivered their arguments by using a variety of language intensifiers, such as strong adverbs, adjectives and metaphors. Secondly, they frequently interlaced their argumentation with interactional fallacies, such as arguments

Moment to moment, a writer faces a host of potential problems. How does the writer’s mind coordinate this problem solving? In the original Hayes and Flower model, the authors posited a distinct process to manage this coordinating—that is, the “monitor.” The monitor became responsible for executive function in writing. In two experiments, the current authors investigated monitor function by examining the coordination of two common writing tasks—editing (i.e., correcting an error) and sentence composing—in the presence or absence of an error and with a low or high memory load for the writer. In the first experiment, participants could approach the editing and composing task in either order. On most trials (88%), they finished the sentence first, and less frequently (12%), they corrected the error first. The error-first approach occurred significantly more often under the low-load condition than the high-load condition. For the second experiment, participants were asked to adopt the less-used, error-first approach. Success in completing the assigned task order was affected by both memory load and error type. These results suggest that the monitor depends on the relative availability of working memory resources and coordinates subtasks to mitigate direct competition over those resources.

Awareness of the reader and ability to adapt the text to the reader are assumed to be important aspects of successful writing. Models of writing development include the aspect of reader awareness, as a rhetorical goal, that writers develop gradually and that eventually distinguishes expert writers from novice writers. However, developing writers can present an awareness of writing aspects without being able to apply them successfully on task. The role of maturation on the one hand and instruction and training on the other have been put forward as crucial aspects of writing development. Against this background, six writers, representing different levels of expertise in writing, undertook the same writing tasks. Eighteen texts, interviews and stimulated recall protocols are analysed, compared and contrasted with a particular focus on writers’ awareness of and adaptation to the intended reader. Keystroke logs provide a solid and complementary base for detailed analysis of the writing processes, in which revisions relating to a reader perspective are of particular importance. Findings provide support for the theoretical framework, but they also raise questions about the role of knowledge about genre and writing strategies in relation to maturation for successful writing development. Keywords: writing development; reader awareness; reader adaptation; keystroke logging; knowledge crafting; cognitive processes; revision; stimulated recall