ABSTRACT
Over the last 30 years, many studies have examined the composition of written text. These studies have mainly dealt with the characteristics of texts and the conditions of their production, as well as the time course of text production. They have made use of a variety of paradigms, namely, the analysis of verbal protocols, the measurement of reaction time (RT) in a secondary task, and the measurement of processing times (Olive & Levy, 2002). However, many of these paradigms were systematically used only with adults because, on the one hand, the low-level processes (translating, spelling, handwriting) are relatively automated in adults and, on the other, adults can perform both composition and a secondary task more or less simultaneously. Consequently, the study of written text production is less advanced in children than in adults. In children, composition skills are mainly investigated through the analysis of texts produced in response to specific requirements or production constraints (Fayol, 1991c). The aim of this chapter is to fill this gap, at least partially, by proposing an on-line approach based on the analysis of two temporal parameters—pause duration and writing rate—and their variations according to particular production constraints.
