Acta Psychologica 54 (1983) 197-204 North-Holland 197 zyxwvutsrqponm THE CONSISTENCY OF CURSIVE LETTER FORMATION AS A FUNCTION OF POSITION IN THE WORD * Alan M. WING, M. Ian NIMMO-SMITH and Margery A. ELDRIDGE Medtcal Research Council Applied Psycho&v Unit, UK Accepted May 1983 In printed text the form of each successive letter is independent of its predesessors. In cursive script this need not be the case. Indeed in his theoretical account of the production of handwriting based on an analysis of errors, Ellis (1982) suggests that, given the spelling of the word, the selection of form depends on the position of the letter in the word and the letters that precede it. This paper presents an analysis of the consistency with which a group of 61 right-handed subjects formed particular letters as a function of whether the letter occurred at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the word. Ellis’ hypothesis was supported by the finding that the probability of the same form of a letter being used over repeated samples of writing was higher in the medial and final word positions than in the initial position. Introduction The English alphabet comprises 26 graphemes but, in most people’s handwriting, each grapheme is represented by a number of different allographs or letter forms. Thus, for example, the block capital [F], print script [f] and cursive letter [f] are qualitatively distinct allographs of the grapheme (f). Moreover, on different occasions a writer may produce a given allograph with minor variations so that it is useful to refer to a set of graphs, or concrete realizations, emanating from each allograph. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of his own spontaneous handwriting errors, Ellis (1979) has suggested that this three-level * This paper was written while the first author was on leave of absence in the Cognitive Neuropsychology Lab, Good Samaritan Hospital and Medical Center, Portland, OR. Mailing address: A.M. Wing, Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK. OGOl-6918/83/$3.00 0 1983, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)