Van Waes, L, et al.

2019 A Multilingual Copy Task: Measuring Typing

Journal of and Motor Skills in Writing with Inputlog. Journal of Open Research
open research software Software, 7: 30. DOI: [Link]

SOFTWARE METAPAPER

A Multilingual Copy Task: Measuring Typing and Motor

Skills in Writing with Inputlog
Luuk Van Waes, Mariëlle Leijten, Tom Pauwaert and Eric Van Horenbeeck
Department of Management, University of Antwerp, BE
Corresponding author: Luuk Van Waes ([Link]@[Link])

Keyboarding is an essential mode of text production. In the context of typing courses, instruments
have been developed to gauge typing skills but to our knowledge there is no computerized typing test
measuring both motor skills and the influence of different levels of lexicality on typing fluency. That
is why, we developed a strictly controlled copy task guiding participants through seven modules in
which different prompts are presented, each dealing with complementary levels of lexicality. Fine-grained
keystroke logging allows for a range of analyses with Inputlog [16].
The copy task can be used in writing process studies: research shows that typing fluency has an impact
in the quality of text production [1, 24]. In previous writing research studies copy tasks have been used
to study the relation between writing fluency and text composition (Wallot and Grabowski, 2013). The
Inputlog copy task allows researchers to investigate different levels of lexicality in more detail. At the
moment the copy task has been developed in ten different languages. The software is open-access and
allows researchers to adapt the tasks to their specific needs.

Keywords: copy tasks; typing skills; motor coordination; keyboarding; writing studies; interkey intervals;
bigram frequency; tapping task; typing fluency
Funding statement: We thank the department of Management, Faculty of Business and Economics at the
University of Antwerp (Belgium) for their financial contribution to this project. We also received support
of ELN (European Literacy Network – COST Action IS1401).

Introduction dementia due to Alzheimer [28]. The task consisted of

Until recently typing dynamics have mainly been analyzed different subtasks in which specific bigram characteristics
in the domain of biometric studies [2, 4, 21]. After were manipulated. This explorative study demonstrates
the introduction of keystroke logging in writing and the potential relevance of using a typing copy task in the
translation studies [16, 23, 27], the analysis of process diagnostic workup of patients with neurodegenerative
based typing skills became more important, for instance brain disorders. It was found that the three groups
in studying writing development [5] or writing fluency differed significantly from each other in performing
[26]. Keystroke logging is especially useful to identify and the assignment and that their typing speed gradually
understand strategies governing the dynamics of writing decreased with age. Moreover, at the methodological
[12, 13]. These analyses mainly focus on dysfluencies in level, integrative multilevel modelling shows that all
writing [17, 19], such as pauses and revisions. the manipulated bigram characteristics contribute
It is shown that typing skills are a factor affecting online significantly to the model. Based on this experience we
text production when generating digital texts [1, 6, 24, 31, further developed the instrument and programmed a user
29], comparable to the role of handwriting in handwritten friendly open experimental tool set, facilitating the use of
text [7, 10, 11, 15]. The advantage of copy tasks is that they copy tasks in a variety of (multilingual) writing research
produce writing conditions where the cognitive load is settings.
low, eliminating to a large extent higher mental processes
such as content planning [9]. The current copy task is Components
designed so that it creates a set of measures allowing a The multilingual copy task was developed as part of
fine-grained analysis of low level typing and motor skills. Inputlog, a keystroke logging program used in writing
A first version of this copy task was developed for and translation studies, made available for researchers
research into the typing and writing behavior of young on [Link] ([16]; see the download section
adults, cognitively healthy elderly, and age-matched for more information on the installation procedure).
elderly with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild However, the copy task is also directly accessible as a
Art. 30, page 2 of 8 Van Waes et al: A Multilingual Copy Task

webtool via: [Link] hands (viz. ‘d’ and ‘k’, resp. a Left-Right and Right-Left hand
[Link]. The source code is downloadable via GitHub combination). Participants are asked to type the ‘d’-’k’ key
(see below). combination for 15 seconds [22]. A time circle at the top
At this moment the copy task has been developed for ten right corner is used as a time indicator. The time starts
languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Norwegian, after the first key press, allowing the participants to read
Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Welsh) and the instructions at their own pace.
three keyboard layouts (Azerty, Qwerty, and Qwertz). The Finger-tapping tasks are commonly used to study the
software has been pretested worldwide in a number of human motor system. They have the advantage of being
experimental studies in ongoing writing and translation simple enough to use in the study of both normal control
research. More than 3000 copy task logs with participants subjects as well as those with neuropathologies affecting
aged between 14 and 82 years have been collected and the motor system [32].
analyzed. A typical copy task consists of seven typing
assignments (Table 1). Sentence copy task
The next task is a sentence copy task. It intends to measure
Tapping task the typing skills related to copying a series of – short and
The first task, the tapping task, intends to measure the high frequent – words presented in a simple sentence. For
fastest motor speed by pressing two keys with alternating example, in the English copy task: “the cat was sleeping
under the apple tree”. Participants are asked to repetitively
Table 1: Overview of the seven components of the copy type this sentence for 30 seconds (without capital letters
task. nor punctuation marks).
The prompted sentence consists of seven to nine high
Components frequent short words (one or two syllables). In developing
Tapping task press the ‘d’ and ‘k’ key alternatively
the task for the different languages, we tried to implement
during 15 s these construction characteristics as consistently
as possible to allow for interlanguage comparison
Sentence copy a sentence during 30 s (Mean(M): 7.9 words; Standard Deviation (SD): 0.8 – M:
Word combination 1 copy a combination of three words 32.3 characters – SD: 2.8).
seven times
Word combination 2 copy a combination of three words Three-word combination
seven times The main part of the copy task consists of four components
in which a three-word combination has to be copy-typed
Word combination 3 copy a combination of three words
seven times: the first three-word combinations target
seven times
the repetitive production of mainly high frequent
Word combination 4 copy a combination of three words bigrams; the fourth contains low frequent bigrams.
seven times Table 2 gives an actual example of the presented word
Consonant groups copy four blocks of six consonants combinations (in the English version), together with
once their characteristics.

Table 2: Examples of the word combination prompts in the English_UK (QWERTY) copy task including the controlled
characteristics.

Word Word Word Word

combination combination combination combination
1 2 3 4
Word 1 (numerical) four seven five some
Word 2 (adjective) interesting wonderful important awkward
Word 3 (noun) questions surprises behaviors zigzags
#characters 24 23 23 18
High Frequent bigrams (HF – e.g., ‘nt’) 19 18 18 8
Low Frequent bigrams (LF – e.g., ‘gz’) 0 0 0 4
Left-Left (LL – e.g., ‘es’) 4 6 1 5
Left-Right (LR – e.g., ‘fo’) 4 6 2 3
Right-Right (RR – e.g., ‘ou’) 4 2 5 1
Right-Left (RL – e.g., ‘us’) 3 4 2 2
Adjacent keys (e.g., ‘io’) 7 6 3 4
Repetitive keys 0 0 0 0
Van Waes et al: A Multilingual Copy Task Art. 30, page 3 of 8

To create the word combinations with high frequent board adjacent bigrams and none (or maximum one)
bigrams, we used the following criteria: repetitive keys (Figure 1).

1. Words: Three words are presented per entry, i.e. a For the component with low frequent bigrams (Word
combination of a numeral + an adjective + a noun; combination 4) we used the same criteria, but instead
2. Characters: Total prompt length is between 19 and 24 of selecting high frequency bigrams in the words,
characters in total – [3/4] + [10/12] + [8/10] charac- low frequency bigrams were presented, e.g. three to
ters (average number of characters per word combina- four bigrams occurring in the 50% lowest frequency
tion for all the language tasks: M: 22.3 (SD: 1.6); percentiles of our corpus. The total length of the prompt
3. Word frequency: Only high frequency words are across all languages was slightly shorter than in the high
included (30% highest segment; log lemma frequency frequency components: average number of characters per
of the words or the stem words in case of compound word combination: M 19.0 (SD: 1.3).
words; based on CELEX/Subtlex [3, 14];
4. Bigram frequency: Between 18 to 20 high frequency Consonant groups
bigrams are implemented selected from the 30 % The final component is designed to measure the typing
most frequent percentile in CELEX/Subtlex [3, 14] or skills in a non-lexical context [9]. Participants are asked
another comparable corpus-based bigram frequency to copy four blocks of six consonants once. The blocks
list for languages for which these databases were not are identical for all languages: tjxggl pgkfkq dtdrtt
available. No low frequent bigrams are included in npwdvf.
these three word combinations;
5. Hand combination and key adjacency: A mix of hand Procedure
combinations is addressed with an average of three The copy task is presented to the participant as one fixed
to five bigrams for each hand combination (Left-Left; flow in which he or she is taken from one component to
Left-Right; Right-Left; Right-Right); five to seven key- the next (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Keyboard scheme (e.g. QWERTY) used to define the four hand combinations: Blue = Left hand – Red = Right
hand; midzone is characterized as undefined.

Figure 2: Presentation flow of the copy task.

Art. 30, page 4 of 8 Van Waes et al: A Multilingual Copy Task

In a first step the participant selects the language for Next, the flow brings the user to a brief closing
the copy task. The next screen prompts him/her to briefly questionnaire in which the following subjects are
provide some session information: name/participant addressed: handedness, hardware and browser used for the
code, age and gender; session name (optional) and test, dominant language, reading or writing difficulties,
keyboard used (Azerty, Qwerty or Qwertz, visual help and familiarity with this task. For the handedness test
provided). We also included a privacy notice to obtain we chose the reduced Edinburgh handedness test [18,
explicit consent, in line with the privacy policy of the 30]. Veale proved his assessment to be reliable with only
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the four questions. Finally, the data are stored on a dedicated
European Union. server. The participants have the option to download their
The copy task then starts with a brief introduction to log files locally.
instruct and inform the user about the task. For instance:
“In this session we ask you to type letters, words and Copy task creator
sentences that are shown on the screen. Try to do this A default copy task – based on the principles described
as fast and error free as possible.” When pressing ‘start’ above – is made available in ten languages. However, if a
the components are shown one by one, always preceded researcher wants to translate/transpose the default copy task
by a brief – and specific – instruction. So as to allow the into another language or wants to construct an additional
participants to read the task instructions at their own copy task, he/she can use the so called ‘copy task creator’,
pace, we explicitly inform them that their time only starts made available as an integrated tool in Inputlog but also
after they have typed the first character. available as an isolated, stand-alone tool (see Github). The
The prompt needing to be copied is always presented copy task creator consists of several building blocks that can
separately and printed in dark red (Figure 3). When be combined into a custom-made task flow. The following
switching from the time-based components to the components are defined in the interface (see Figure 4):
repetition-based components (word combinations
that need to be retyped), a separate example screen is 1. Tasks: A task component assists the user in defining a
presented to further clarify this instruction. specific copy task component. It asks for a brief task

Figure 3: Screen captures of the tapping and word combination component.

Figure 4: Initial screen of the copy task creator interface.

Van Waes et al: A Multilingual Copy Task Art. 30, page 5 of 8

instruction, a user prompt and either a time limit or report addresses the following bigram characteristics
a predefined repetition number. (cf. supra):
2. Examples: The example block builds a part of the copy
task requiring no input, only an illustration of what 1. Correctness: Because the participants are challenged
the user is supposed to do in the next task. to find a trade-off between speed and accuracy, cor-
3. Text blocks: A text block component providing feed- rectness scores are reported, both at the overall and
back or feed forward information clarifying the task the component level. These scores indicate the num-
flow so as to guarantee a fluid transition between the ber of correctly typed bigrams as opposed to the num-
different instructions. ber of typing mistakes during copying.
4. Practice: The final option offers the possibility to add 2. Synthesis: Results for the Interkey Intervals (IKI) overall
a ‘practice’ component. It looks like a normal task, and at the component and trial level, including time
however, typing activities are not included in the log filtered results to take into account learning effects;
file. This part gives the participant the possibility to 3. Frequency: Results for IKI’s for high and low frequent
get acquainted with the web interface of the copy task. bigrams;
4. Adjacency: Results for the IKI’s for bigrams that are
After having defined and constructed the flow, the copy formed by combining adjacent and non-adjacent keys
task file can be uploaded and is ready to start. The opening on the keyboard;
and closing questions are default. 5. Repetition: Results for the IKI’s that are composed by
pressing the same key or not;
Copy task analysis 6. Hand combination: Results for the IKI’s with respect
The copy task analysis as provided in Inputlog consists of a to the hand combination used to type the bigram
carefully designed set of perspectives to explore the log file. (location on the keyboard).
The aim is to characterize a participant’s motoric keyboard
interaction based on the different copy task components. For each level within the copy task analysis, several
The output is presented such that it is possible to use the descriptive measures are reported (see Figure 5 for
data in further analyses (e.g., as a co-variate in variance an excerpt). For instance: ‘Count (targeted)’ reports
analyses, or in regression and multilevel analyses). Two the number of characters typed that correspond to a
types of output are generated: an aggregated analysis character that was prompted in one of the respective
(synthesis) and an event-based data file (extended raw copy task components; ‘Mean IKI’ is the arithmetic mean
data) including an automated characterization of all the (in milliseconds) of the targeted bigrams within the
targeted bigrams together with a precise intra bigram scope of the respective analyses. Characters per minute
time-stamp. Both are XML-files. The analysis of the copy (CPM): calculation of (theoretical number of) characters
task log files can be performed in batch in the standard per minute based on the mean IKI, specifically 60 000
Inputlog version 8.X. Automated merging provides a (ms)/mean IKI (ms).
csv file at group level for large data collections enabling For a more detailed description (and an example of a full
further statistical analyses (e.g., in SPSS or R). A visual sample analysis output) we refer to the Github repository
representation of the task flow, together with a more mentioned below.
detailed description, is included in the documentation
folder on Github. Implementation and architecture
The analysis report (styled XML) is preceded by a brief The copy task creator and the web execution environment
summary of the session information, together with the have both been open sourced. Both components are
answers to the initial and final questionnaire. Next, the simple applications of low architectural complexity

Figure 5: Excerpt from the analysis output at the component level (styled XML).
Art. 30, page 6 of 8 Van Waes et al: A Multilingual Copy Task

written as a C# application and javascript/html single the final questionnaire are included as part of the XML-
page web application respectively (see Github). output file.
The task creator consists of a single C# WinForm that The copy task creator is written in C# (2015) and can
allows the user to build a custom copy task by adding their be used as a standalone program. The output generates
own sequence of specific tasks. Their task configuration is an XML file with a specific set of tags that are recognized
then exported to an XML file that contains the copy task by the copy task JavaScript. A language tag in the header
definition. activates the language specific resources for the web
The web application is a JavaScript single page app interface and the navigation instructions.
(web/[Link]) that reads this copy task definition file
and dynamically creates the different screens as defined Dependencies
in definition. Depending on the specified language of the The web application contains all the javascript libraries
copy task a different language resource file will be loaded it depends on in the web/scripts/folder. The copy task
to provide localized instructions. The fallback language creator written in C# is built on top of the .NET Framework
for a missing resource translation is English. During the version 4.6.1.
execution of the test all the relevant keyboard activities of
the user are tracked by hooking into the keypress events List of contributors
of the input areas. Each incoming event is timed and We thank Sebastian Fierens and Tom Pauwaert for their
stored in an event list until the very end when the user help in programming the copy task.
submits their task. At that point the event list is exported
to the IDFX xml format which can be processed by the Software location
respective copy task analysis in Inputlog. This hook and The compiled ready-to-use software is hosted on the
the corresponding event serialization code can be found Inputlog website and is downloadable from there: http://
in the scripts/[Link] file on the Github repository. [Link] (Inputlog version 8). This website
hosts the main application as well as additional materials
Quality control (manual; presentations; articles; videos). The software
The logging accuracy of the copy task is tested and is free to use after completing a simple registration
compared to the Inputlog logging accuracy [20]. The time procedure.
log accuracy has the same maxdiff of 8 ms [8], which is in The source code for the copy task itself and the copy
line with other keystroke logging programs, like Scriptlog task creator is hosted in the GitHub repository, mentioned
or CyWrite. below.
In a test-retest experiment the copy task reliability has
been measured. Fifty participants completed the task twice Archive and Code repository: GitHub
(with a time lag of 4 months in between). The results show Name: Inputlog-Copy-Task
that the test results are highly consistent: Pearson r = .932 URL: [Link]
(p < .001 – overall Median interkey intervals: Mt1 = 116 -Task
ms; SD = 17; Mt1 = 115 ms; SD = 19). Additional analysis License: MIT License
with GLM repeated measures Anova at the component Publisher: Luuk van Waes & Mariëlle Leijten
level showed a strong main effect of the components, Contact: [Link]@[Link] or marielle.
(F (4,192) = 227.353; p < .001; ηp2 = .826). Post-hoc leijten@[Link]
Bonferroni also shows a significant effect at the individual Persistent identifier: DOI: [Link]
component level, indicating that the different (main) zenodo.2908966
components address different (lexical) characteristics of Project homepage: [Link]
motor related typing skills. Version published: 1.0.0
Date published: 30/05/2018
Availability
Operating system Language
The copy task is web based and is tested on most common The web-based copy task is currently available in ten
browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and languages. The task, the instructions and the interface
Opera – OSX/Windows). The copy task creator is only are rendered in the selected language by the program
available for Windows (version 8 and higher). (JavaScript). A language resource database with
translations of the navigation, instruction and error
Programming language messages has been developed for that purpose.
The copy task is developed in JavaScript (with JQuery
2.1.0) and is web based. The logfile is stored as an XML-file Reuse potential
conforming to the IDFX-structure [25]. The file is event The copy task creator makes it easy to develop a
based and contains all key strokes with a time stamp (key standardized copy task in other languages, and to adapt
down time for every key press) and an identification of the the existing tasks to specific needs. It is also possible to
active component and of any trials within that component. edit the JavaScript used. The modular concept allows the
In addition, the session identification and the answers to development of new components creating other copy task
Van Waes et al: A Multilingual Copy Task Art. 30, page 7 of 8

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How to cite this article: Van Waes, L, Leijten, M, Pauwaert, T and Van Horenbeeck, E 2019 A Multilingual Copy Task:
Measuring Typing and Motor Skills in Writing with Inputlog. Journal of Open Research Software, 7: 30. DOI: [Link]
org/10.5334/jors.234

Submitted: 04 June 2018 Accepted: 23 August 2019 Published: 16 October 2019

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