ABSTRACT
Writing is a task with many properties that should attract the attention of cognitive scientists. First, it is a real rather than a ‘toy’ task. It is a frequent and important part of everyday life. Second, it is a complex natural language task involving lexical, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of language. Third, it is a generative task, which distinguishes it from reading, a much more frequently studied natural language task. Finally, it is a task that has interesting parallels and contrasts with computer programming, a task that has already attracted considerable attention from cognitive scientists.
