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images from Penmanship, Theoretical and Practical, Illustrated and Explained by B. F. Foster, 1843

Lexical Access For Handwritten Words

Handwritten word recognition is a field of study that has largely been neglected in the psychological literature, despite its prevalence in society. Whereas spoken word recognition research almost exclusively employs natural, human voices as stimuli, visual word recognition research uses only standard, computer-generated typefaces, potentially simplifying the process of word recognition. In a series of experiments, we examined the effect that handwriting has on a series of lexical variables thought to influence bottom-up and top-down processes, including word frequency, regularity, bidirectional consistency, and imageability. The results indicate that the natural physical ambiguity of handwritten stimuli forces a greater reliance on top-down processes. The processing slow-down imposed by handwriting allows relatively small effects in typewritten words to be magnified, exerting a stronger influence on recognition. The findings suggest that future studies of word recognition should consider the implementation of handwritten stimuli to fully measure the capabilities and tendencies of the human perceptual system.

Barnhart, A. S. & Goldinger, S. D. Interpreting chicken-scratch: Lexical access for handwritten words. Under review at Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. (PDF)

Barnhart, A. S. & Goldinger, S. D. (2007, November). Interpreting chicken-scratch: Lexical access with handwritten words. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Long Beach, CA.

Barnhart, A. S. & Goldinger, S. D. (in preparation). Orthographic and phonological neighborhood effects in handwritten word recognition.

The Role of Motor Systems in Handwriting Recognition

A series of evolutionary adaptations for grasping, gestural communication and, subsequently, oral communication have led to an intimate association between the processing of language and activation in the right hand. Experiments examining this association typically focus on covert hand activation, not overt hand movement. In a series of experiments, we are examining what influence handwriting has on this concurrent activation of language centers and motor areas in the brain through a new paradigm employing the use of a hand dynamometer. Preliminary findings indicate that the processing of handwritten words affects squeeze dynamics for the right hand, but not the left. These measures also reflect the inherent lexical properties of the words being processed.

Barnhart, A. S. & Goldinger, S. D. (in preparation). Concurrent motor activation in the hand during lexical access for handwritten words.

Here's a presentation I gave at the 2009 Western Psychological Association conference in Portland Oregon:

(citation): Barnhart, A. S. & Goldinger, S. D. (2009, April). Get a grip and go for Broca. Presented paper at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association in Portland, OR.

Hemispheric Asymmetries in Handwritten Word Recognition

Despite the large amount of convergent evidence suggesting that the RH may have capabilities that make it especially adept at recognizing handwriting, only one study has looked specifically at the topic (Hellige, 1986), and its findings were far from unequivocal. The RH has been shown to have an increased reliance on top-down information for recognition of words and seems to be equipped with a subsystem that allows it to deal with novel word forms more efficiently than the LH. I am currently in the early stages of a series of experiments testing the relative contributions of each hemisphere of the brain to the recognition of the handwritten words.