Peer-reviewed research
Prosodic Boundaries in Writing: Evidence from a Keystroke Analysis
Susanne Fuchs and Jelena Krivokapić, Frontiers in Psychology, 2016 · DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01678
Read the originalRead on October 17, 2026
- What it is
- A keystroke study that recorded the time between key presses while participants wrote an email, then compared those gaps at commas, at full stops and between ordinary words with pauses in read-aloud speech.
- How much weight it carries
- Peer-reviewed, open access, with the keystroke data described in the paper. It studies phrasing in writing rather than typing tests, uses one writing task, and covers only commas and full stops, so it shows that punctuation changes the rhythm of typing but not how much it changes a score.
Facts taken from this source
- In a keystroke study of writing, the time between key presses differed significantly at commas and at full stops compared with ordinary word boundaries, with the gaps shortest between words and longest at full stops.
“Results provide evidence of significant differences between interkey durations between words, at commas and at full stops (from shortest to longest)” (Abstract)