ABSTRACT
The infinite monkey theorem says a room full of monkeys typing letters on
a keyboard for infinity will eventually produce any text, like the works of
Shakespeare or this chapter (Borel, 1913). This small space of natural texts has
more predictable structure than the many other random texts produced by the
typing monkeys. For example, letters and bigrams that occur in English appear
with particular frequencies, some high and some low. The present work examines
whether typists, who routinely produce letters by manipulating a keyboard,
become sensitive to these statistical aspects of the texts they type. Answering
this question addresses debate about how people learn to produce serially ordered
actions (Lashley, 1951).
