Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we introduce a novel way of quantifying typing expertise according to the ability to type without visual guidance from the keyboard (i.e., in a blind typing task). We present results of two experiments showing that performance in blind typing allows dissociating two profiles of typists, touch and non-touch typists. In Experiment 1, analyzing more than 100 typists, we show that performance in blind typing correlates with faster typing speed of lexical and non-lexical material, but not with low-level motoric skills. In Experiment 2, we show that touch and non-touch typists present differences in both written and spoken language production, but not language perception. Our results demonstrate that the characterization of “everyday touch typists” not only discriminates typing skills but may also capture distinct cognitive abilities. Spanning the fields of sensorimotor and linguistic processing, this study stresses the importance of considering language processing to understand typing skills.