RUUD G. J. MEULENBROEK
GERARD P. VAN GALEN
Nijmegen Institute for Cognitive Research
and Information Technology
The Netherlands

ABSTRACT. A number of factors determining the perceptual-motor complexity of
letter forms are discussed. An experiment is reported in which primary school chil-
dren wrote the lower-case letters of a cursive alphabet twice, once after the visual
presentation of printed letters and once after the visual presentation of cursive
stimulus letters. Response-initiation-time differences between these two types of ex-
perimental trials were considered to reflect a cognitive translation process from the
graphic to the motoric level. The analyses revealed that spatial ambiguity, allo-
graphic variability, contextual ambiguity, and letter frequency are determinants of
the time needed by children for perceiving printed producing corresponding cur-
sive letters. The motoric complexity of writing cursive letters was investigated by
analyzing writing velocity, dysfluency, and curvature measurements of produced
grapheme segments. The anlayses indicated that letter frequency and the curvature
of grapheme segments determine the motoric complexity of cursive graphemes. Edu-
cational implications based on these findings are discussed.

LEARNING TO WRITE involves the mastering of printed and/or cur-
sive letters, a complex learning process with both cognitive and motoric as-
pects. Models of reading and writing, like those of Ellis ( 1982, 1988 ) and
Margolin ( 1984 ), state that in order to write (or read) correctly, a subject
must have sufficient lexical knowledge Oexical route) or have a set of pho-
neme-grapheme translation rules with which phonological codes can be
translated into graphemic codes (phonological route). In both ways, a
motor program, i.e., an internal representation of a movement pattern, is
activated and stored in a short-term motor buffer. The motor program con-
trols the motoric output process and consists of an abstract code ( Keele,
1981) representing the number of strokes and their spatial relations ( Van Galen
& Teulings, 1983). When a decision about which letter to execute is
made, the output process is still under the influence of allographic variabili-

-95-