Fact · Dictation
In a 2015 laboratory study of 90 participants, fluency on the Alternative Uses Task was higher when ideas were written down than when they were spoken aloud.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“fluency of AUT performance was higher in the writing than in the speaking condition”
Interaction effect of response medium and working memory capacity on creative idea generation, Ning Hao et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2015, Abstract.
Open the original (DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01582)- What it measures
- Participants generated uses for everyday objects, which is a creativity test. Fluency here means the number of ideas produced, not their quality. The study compared writing ideas down with saying them aloud, and did not involve dictation software.
- What it does not show
- A single lab task with short answers, not drafting prose. The study does not test dictation, speech recognition or writer's block, and fluency is a count of ideas rather than the quality of a finished text.