Handwriting Kinematic Differences Between Copying and Dictation

Handwriting is a human activity that may be affected by the modality used as input of the information to be written, mainly copying or dictation. Many processes at different levels are involved to produce motor planning and graphomotor automation of handwriting. In order to quantify possible kinematic differences due to the influence of auditory or visual input modalities to these processes, three different tests were proposed to a sample of 101 young students and several kinematics parameters measuring handwriting characteristics were evaluated. The tests required to copy as accurate (CA) and as fast (CF) as possible an Italian sentence and to write the same sentence under dictation (DF). All parameters showed significant differences between each pair of the three tests. The best performance was obtained in the CF test followed by the DF and CA tests; in the latter the greater accuracy required to produce writing yielded lower velocity and automation as well as a longer motor planning time. On the other hand, the dictation response was more similar to that of CF than CA showing a larger planning time, probably due to a different time necessary to correctly identify the words to reproduce. The combination of the two tests could be useful to study the impairment of either visual or auditory input.