Book
Crunching Big Data With Fingertips: How Typists Tune Their Performance Toward the Statistics of Natural Language
Lawrence P. Behmer Jr. and Matthew J. C. Crump, Big Data in Cognitive Science (Routledge), chapter 14, 2016
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- The chapter reports typing data from a large online crowd-sourced study and compares the timing of keystrokes with the letter, bigram and trigram frequencies of English text. It finds that typists' keystroke timing follows the statistics of natural language.
- How much weight it carries
- A peer-reviewed research chapter in an academic volume, written by the researchers who collected the data. It is a book chapter rather than a journal article, and the sample is self-selected online volunteers.
Facts taken from this source
- In a crowd-sourced typing study, keystroke timing correlated with the letter, bigram and trigram frequencies of English text.
“the timing of keystrokes correlates with sequential structure (letter, bigram, and trigram frequencies) in English texts” (Abstract)