Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language entails many nested time scales, ranging from therelatively slow scale of cultural evolution to the rapid scale ofindividual cognition. The nested, multiscale nature oflanguage implies that even simple acts of text production,such as typing a sentence, entail complex interactionsinvolving multiple concurrent processes. As such, textproduction may have much in common with other cognitivephenomena thought to emerge from multiplicativeinteractions across temporal scales, namely those that exhibitfractal properties. We investigated the relationship betweenfractal scaling and the quality of produced text. Participants(N=131) wrote essays while their keystrokes were recorded.Fractal analyses were then performed on time series ofinterkeystroke intervals (IKIs). Results showed that fractalproperties characterizing IKIs positively predicted expertratings of essay quality, even after accounting for essaylength. The results support our hypotheses concerningmultiscale coordination and text production.