Swiss Journal of Psychology, 73 (2), 2014, 87–96

Sw issJ. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014W. Wicki

Verlag et al.:
Hans Handw
Huber, ritingAG
Hogrefe Fluency
, Bern

Original Communication

Handwriting Fluency in Children

Impact and Correlates
Werner Wicki1, Sibylle Hurschler Lichtsteiner1,
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Andrea Saxer Geiger2, and Marianne Müller1,3

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1
Institute of Teaching and Learning, University of Teacher Education, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2Institute
Unterstrass, University of Teacher Education, Zurich, Switzerland, 3School of Engineering, Institute of
Data Analysis and Process Design, University of Applied Sciences, Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract. This cross-sectional study aimed to (1) construct a model of handwriting fluency in children and (2) explore the impact of
fluent handwriting and visual-motor integration on orthographic skills. In a Swiss sample of 93 fourth graders (mean age = 10 years, 7
months; SD = 6.58 months), handwriting speed and legibility were assessed by means of a copying task. Furthermore, automaticity of
handwriting, stroke pressure, and stroke frequency were measured on a digitizing tablet, while visual-motor integration and orthographic
skills were assessed by means of standardized tests. SEM modeling revealed that automaticity of handwriting, which is associated with
both stroke frequency and stroke pressure, predicts handwriting speed as well as orthographic skills. The latter association remained
significant even when visual-motor integration, which also proved to be a predictor of orthographic skills, was included in the model.
The results are discussed with respect to theories that assume that the automaticity of handwriting is associated with saving cognitive
resources.

Keywords: handwriting, fluency, speed, stroke pressure, orthographic skills, visual-motor integration

Despite the fact that today’s children are increasingly ap-
plying their keyboarding skills, handwriting is still consid-
ered a cultural technique that is crucial not only for fulfill-
ing academic requirements such as being able to respond
to an essay question in a written examination (Connelly,
Dockrell, & Barnett, 2005), but also in everyday life, for
example, when one needs to make a note of something or
write a shopping list. Thus, in most countries handwriting
instruction remains part of the obligatory school curricu-
lum, and it is clear – at least among educational psycholo-
gists – that it should improve legibility, fluency, and speed
of handwriting. However, as pointed out by Medwell and
Wray (2007), handwriting lessons at school predominantly
focus on the production of well-formed, neatly displayed
letters, but neglect the automation and fluency of handwrit-
ing.
So far, many studies on fluency have relied on handwrit-
ing speed, as measured by the number of letters a person
can write when copying or composing a text within a given
amount of time. These studies showed an impressive in-
crease in handwriting speed from about 20 letters per
minute for first graders to about 110 letters per minute for
ninth graders (e.g., Graham, Berninger, Weintraub, &
Schafer, 1998).
However, handwriting fluency entails more than speed:
It concerns the automaticity of the writing movements. Au-
tomaticity is assumed to be an important means of saving
cognitive resources for higher-order writing tasks, for ex-
ample, of a lexical or syntactical nature (Bourdin & Fayol,
1994, 2000; Christensen, 2005; Graham, Harris, & Fink,
2000). The process-oriented understanding of handwriting
fluency has been strongly promoted by graphonomic re-
search methods that record kinematic data (viz., handwrit-
ing movements) by digitizing tablets and computational
programs (Meulenbroek & Van Galen, 1986; Thomassen,
2003). Specifically, using such methods, one can record the
number of inversions in velocity (NIV) that occur during
every single stroke that is made when a person is writing
single letters, words, or sentences (Mai & Marquardt,
1999). A fluent writer is expected to have a perfect mean
NIV of 1 resulting from one (and only one) acceleration
followed by one (and only one) deceleration per stroke. In
contrast, 8-year-old children, who are still learning hand-
writing, show a great deal of dysfluency, that is, accelerat-
ing and decelerating much more frequently within strokes
(Meulenbroek & Van Galen, 1988, 1989). Subsequently,
their mean NIV usually exceeds 1.
Graphonomic research has identified several factors af-
fecting handwriting fluency in adults (Tucha, Tucha, &
Lange, 2008). For example, increased attention when writ-
ing nonwords or trying to write neatly has a detrimental
effect on automation (Tucha et al., 2008). For young chil-

DOI 10.1024/1421-0185/a000127 Swiss J. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
 88 W. Wicki et al.: Handwriting Fluency
dren (aged 7 to 9), it is easier to perform upstrokes than
downstrokes and they can draw counterclockwise rotating
patterns more quickly than patterns with alternating direc-
tions (Meulenbroek & Van Galen, 1986). Furthermore, in
8- to 12-year-olds, connecting strokes in cursive writing
were found to show a discontinuous developmental trend
while within-letter strokes showed a continuous develop-
mental trend (Meulenbroek & Van Galen, 1989).
In summary, process-oriented studies showed consider-
able developmental change in fluency improvement in chil-
dren aged 7 to 10 years compared to older children (see
also Mojet, 1991; Zesiger, Mounoud, & Hauert, 1993).
Therefore, in order to study the impact of fluency on high-
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er-order writing skills, it seemed wise to assess handwriting
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fluency in children who were approximately 10 years old
(fourth graders), an age at which fluency has already
reached a certain developmental stage.
To our knowledge, previous studies of children’s hand-
writing fluency have rarely investigated the relationships
between stroke frequency (i.e., the speed of upward and
downward movements), NIV (automation), and stroke
pressure. Thus, the present study is also aimed to explore
the relationships between these measures.
Previous research findings are inconsistent regarding the
impact of both gender and handedness on handwriting
skills. Girls have been found to write faster (Graham et al.,
1998; Ziviani, 1984), more legibly (Graham et al., 1998),
and more proficiently than boys of the same age (Vlachos
& Bonoti, 2006). However, Hill, Gladden, Porter, and Coo-
per (1982) did not find a gender effect on accuracy of writ-
ten strokes in manuscript handwriting in their small sample.
While at least one study did not find any effect of handed-
ness on speed and legibility in a small sample (Peters &
McGrory, 1987), right-handers outperformed left-handers
with respect to speed but not legibility in another study
based on a larger sample (Graham et al., 1998). Therefore,
both gender and handedness were included as variables in
the present study.
Another research gap concerns the effects of handwrit-
ing automaticity on higher-order processes of writing such
as ideation, semantic coding, or monitoring syntactic struc-
tures. With respect to its low-level components, handwrit-
ing requires an integration and coordination of allographic
representations and fine-motor skills. The less this integra-
tion is automated, the more an increase in cognitive load is
generally to be expected (Bourdin & Fayol, 1994). There-
fore, handwriting automation is assumed to save resources
for the remaining processes involved in text production
(Grabowski, 2010). If a child’s handwriting is not yet au-
tomated, the additional demands on cognitive resources re-
lated to the more complex task of text production easily
overwhelm the cognitive system, resulting in poor text pro-
duction performance. Support for these assumptions came
from studies showing that children produced more and
qualitatively better texts when they were allowed to dictate
the content to a scribe as opposed to writing it themselves
(e.g., Graham, 1990). In a similar vein, Bourdin and Fayol
Swiss J. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
(1994) and Grabowski (2010) found that memory span for
words was better among children (but not among adults)
when recall was performed orally instead of in writing, thus
providing evidence that the (high) cognitive load caused by
their low degree of handwriting automation has a detrimen-
tal effect on children’s working memory. Furthermore, sev-
eral studies revealed substantial correlations between hand-
writing skills and more complex components of writing
(Berninger & Swanson, 1994; Christensen & Jones, 1999).
Finally, Christensen (2005) demonstrated that an 8-week
handwriting training program improved the quality and
quantity of written text of adolescent students with poor
orthographic-motor integration, while there was no im-
provement in the control group (students who were encour-
aged to write a diary).
Information processing and psycholinguistic models of
handwriting production assume that serial and parallel pro-
cesses have a hierarchical structure (e.g., Kandel, Peere-
man, Grosjacques, & Fayol, 2011; Van Galen, 1991; Van
Galen, Meulenbroek, & Hylkema, 1986). Higher-level pro-
cesses including ideation, syntax, semantics, and the like
are presumably executed before lower-level processes such
as retrieval of orthographic and allographic representations
and the execution of fine-motor movements. At least some
processes are believed to occur simultaneously, that is, a
writer executes an allograph while planning to write the
next syllable during continuous writing (Kandel, Álvarez,
& Vallée, 2006; Kandel et al., 2011). Interferences between
different levels are likely to occur during parallel process-
ing.
In our study, we expected to find an association between
handwriting automaticity and orthographic skills because
a low degree of automaticity and the resulting need to con-
trol fine-motor movements will increase the cognitive load
on working memory, which in turn will decrease the
amount of cognitive resources otherwise available for the
acquisition of orthographic skills. Specifically, we expect-
ed automation, measured as the number of inversions of
velocity, to foster writing speed and be directly related to
the level of orthographic skill achieved by 10-year-olds.
From a theoretical point of view, handwriting automa-
tion is surely not the only factor explaining orthographic
skill. While some studies found that visual-motor integra-
tion (VMI) was associated with legibility (e.g., Tseng &
Murray, 1994; Volman, van Schendel, & Jongmans, 2006),
other studies revealed that the Developmental Test of VMI
was not able to predict handwriting difficulties in young
children (from kindergarten to grade 1; Marr & Cermak,
2002) and was not sensitive enough to assess VMI in older
children with handwriting dysfunction (Goyen & Duff,
2005). However, there is evidence that VMI is related to
academic performance in reading and writing (Kulp, 1999;
Sortor & Kulp, 2003). We thus included this variable to
control for its impact on orthographic skills. Finally, due to
the mixed composition of our Swiss sample with respect to
the participants’ parents’ mother tongue, we also controlled
for that variable (dichotomized as German vs. not Ger-
 W. Wicki et al.: Handwriting Fluency
man); at least one German study showed that children
whose parents’ mother tongue was not German performed
worse with respect to German orthography than children
whose parents were native speakers of German (Valtin,
Badel, Löffler, Meyer-Schepers, & Voss, 2003).
Method
Participants
The participants in this study were 93 fourth graders ran-
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domly selected from nine public school classes. These
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classes were distributed over different municipalities of the
Canton of Lucerne, which is situated in the German-speak-
ing part of Switzerland. First, we recruited the 41 fourth
graders (distributed over seven classes), who had already
participated as third graders in a study conducted a year
earlier on the impact of different handwriting types
(Hurschler Lichtsteiner, Saxer Geiger, & Wicki, 2008).
Second, in order to increase the size of the present sample,
52 additional students were randomly selected from classes
that were already participating as well as from two other
classes. The sample thus consisted of 93 children from nine
classes from eight different schools. The students’ average
age was 10 years and 7 months (SD = 6.58; range =
116–149 months). Forty-eight of the children were girls
and 45 were boys. Thirteen children (or 14%) were left-
handers; 27 children (or 29%) had at least one parent who
was not a native speaker of German. Since one girl (right-
hander) did not complete the test on orthographic skills, the
sample varies between N = 92 and N = 93, depending on
the inclusion of this measure. At the time of the investiga-
tion, none of the children had learning disabilities or be-
havioral problems. Informed consent was obtained from
the parents of all of the children who participated in the
study.
Procedure
The students completed a copying task, several standard-
ized handwriting tasks using a digitizing tablet, a test of
visual-motor integration, and a test of orthographic skills.
In addition, a self-report measure about one’s self-concept
concerning one’s writing ability was administered. Since
the handwriting self-concept is beyond the focus of this
paper, we will not discuss the results of this measure (they
are reported elsewhere, see Hurschler Lichtsteiner, Saxer
Geiger, & Wicki, 2010).
Copying Task
The copying task took exactly 5 min and was group-admin-
istered by the teacher in the students’ classroom. The se-
89
lected text had already been used in a previous study
(Hurschler Lichtsteiner et al., 2008). It proved to be age-
appropriate regarding lexical, grammatical, and ortho-
graphic demands and also long enough to prevent the stu-
dents from finishing the copying task prematurely (i.e.,
faster than in 5 min). First, the teacher handed out the text,
pencils, and writing paper and read the text to the students.
Second, he or she instructed them to write fast and legibly,
that is, not simply as fast as possible, but as fast as possible
while still writing legibly. To avoid frustration, they were
also told that it was not possible to copy the whole text
within the time given. The handwritten copies of the text
were then collected and submitted to speed and legibility
analyses (see below).
Handwriting Tasks
Additional handwriting tasks were completed in individual
sessions using a digitizing tablet. These tasks included writ-
ing a five-word sentence twice (“Die Kinder fliegen nach
Amerika.” [The children are flying to America.]) This sen-
tence was presented in block letters on a card and read to
the child by the experimenter. Subsequently, the child was
to copy the sentence in his/her own handwriting on a blank
piece of paper affixed to the tablet. In the second trial, the
child was asked to write the sentence as fast as possible.
Several precursor movements of handwriting consisting of
scribbling, upward and downward movements (finger
movements), wrist movements, circling (combination of
finger and wrist movements), and double loops were as-
sessed as well and have been reported elsewhere (Hurschler
Lichtsteiner et al., 2010).
Test of Visual-Motor Integration
Beery and Beery’s (2006) standardized visual-motor test
was group-administered by the teachers during a separate
session. The teachers were instructed to follow the proce-
dure as described in the test manual. After the children had
completed the test, the teachers collected the test booklets
and sent them to the research team at the University of
Teacher Education.
Test of Orthographic Skills
Similarly, a standardized test measuring orthographic skill
(May, 2002) was group-administered by the teachers in a
separate session. The teachers were instructed to follow the
procedures as described in the test manual.
Swiss J. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
 90 W. Wicki et al.: Handwriting Fluency
Measures
Legibility
The legibility of the children’s handwriting was rated based
on dimensions derived from Mahrhofer (2004), which were
further developed and improved in an earlier study
(Hurschler Lichtsteiner et al., 2008). The legibility scale
consisted of nine 6-point Likert type items (i.e., “The dis-
tance between words is larger than between letters.”) rang-
ing from 1 (not true) to 6 (completely true). The internal
consistency of the scale (Cronbach’s α = .76) and the in-
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terrater reliability coefficients of the respective items were
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satisfactory (all κs = .68).
Speed
In line with previous handwriting studies that often defined
speed as the total number of letters written within a given
amount of time, we measured the number of letters written
in 5 min in the copying task described above.
With respect to the handwriting tasks that were complet-
ed on a digitizing tablet (copying a sentence twice as de-
scribed above), three handwriting measures were derived:
Number of Inversions in Velocity (NIV)
The mean number of inversions indicates the average num-
ber of velocity changes that occur when a person is writing
single strokes (within letters). Fluent handwriting requires
only one velocity change per stroke (acceleration followed
by deceleration) and therefore results in an NIV score that
is approximately or exactly equal to 1, whereby 1 indicates
perfect automaticity (Mai & Marquardt, 1999).
Stroke Frequency (FREQ)
This measure refers to the number of upward and down-
ward movements in 1 s. Previous studies with adults found
average frequencies of around 5 Hz (Mai & Marquardt,
1999).
Stroke Pressure (PRESS)
The pressure of handwriting was measured in Newton (N).
It indicates the average amount of pressure exerted by the
pen on the paper. The mean amount of pressure measured
for adults varies between 1 und 1.5 N (Mai & Marquardt,
1999).
Swiss J. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
Manipulation Check Regarding First and Second
Tablet Trial
The mean number of inversions of velocity (NIV) de-
creased significantly from 2.74 (SE = .22), when the chil-
dren wrote the sentence on the tablet the first time, to 1.57
(SE = .07), when they wrote the same sentence under time
pressure (Wilcoxon test Z = –8.19, p < .001). We therefore
concluded that the children had followed the instruction to
“write as fast as possible” very well.
In addition to the handwriting measures described
above, the following measures were administered due to
our interest in the associations with handwriting automa-
ticity.
Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration
VMI (Beery & Beery, 2006)
This standardized test was “designed to assess the extent to
which individuals can integrate their visual and motor abil-
ities” (Beery & Beery, 2006, p. 14). It consists of 30 tasks
of increasing complexity that are to be copied successively.
Scoring was completed following the instructions in the
test manual. The raw scores were used in our statistical
analyses.
Test of Orthographic Skills (May, 2002)
The participants’ orthographic skills were measured by
means of the standardized test “Hamburger Schreibprobe
4–5” (May, 2002). The test items for fourth graders com-
prise 42 German words that are dictated: Sixteen single
words (i.e., Quarkkuchen, Fernsehprogramm) and five sen-
tences consisting of 26 words. The students were asked to
write the word and phrases in a booklet. For the purpose of
this study, we restricted the scoring procedure to calculat-
ing the sum of the correctly spelled words. The raw scores
(total number of correctly spelled words) were used in our
statistical analyses.
Apparatus (Digitizing Tablet)
Handwriting movements were recorded and analyzed using
the general software package CSWin (Marquardt & Mai,
2007) on a personal computer (Lenovo ThinkPad T61p
Type 6457–7WG) connected to a digitizing tablet (Wacom
Intuos 3 Pen Tablet PT2-930G and Intuos Inking Pen). The
sampling frequency was 200 Hz and the accuracy was
0.1 mm in both x and y directions. Due to the inductive
method of measurement, position data are recorded even if
the stylus is lifted (less than 10.0 mm) above the tablet.
Nonparametric regression methods (kernel estimation) are
part of the mathematical procedures of CSWin (Marquardt
& Mai, 1994). They were used to calculate and to smooth
 W. Wicki et al.: Handwriting Fluency
Table 1. Transformations into normal distribution
Variable Shapiro-Wilk (before transformation)
W (df) p W (df)
Speed .96 (93) .005
NIV1 .67 (93) .000
NIV2 .69 (93) .000
PRESS1 .96 (93) .004
PRESS2 .97 (93) .026
FREQ2 .98 (93) .20
OS .91 (92) .000
Note. Speed = number of letters written in 5 min; NIV1/NIV2 = number of inversions in velocity, 1st and 2nd trial; PRESS1/PRESS2 = pressure
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of handwriting, 1st and 2nd trial; FREQ2 = number of upward and downward movements in 1 s, 2nd trial; OS = orthographic skills.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
velocity and acceleration signals. For the filter parameters
selected (standard band width for position 30 ms, speed
50 ms, and acceleration 70 ms), Mai and Marquardt (1995)
showed that the resulting errors are so small that they can
be safely neglected.
Statistical Procedures
In order to meet the requirements for parametric statistics,
the variables not fitting a normal distribution (as confirmed
by Shapiro-Wilk tests) were submitted to a transformation
to produce approximate normality by means of the algo-
rithms shown in Table 1. In most cases, the transformations
worked well. The one exception was the orthographic skills
raw score, although an improvement of the distribution was
obvious (skewness = –.31, SE = .25; kurtosis = –.65, SE =
.50). A similar problem arose when we tried to transform
the raw score of the VMI (W = .97, p = .02), for which we
did not find a suitable algorithm. However, the deviation
from a normal distribution was not dramatic for that vari-
able either (skewness = –.12, SE = .25; kurtosis = –.83, SE
= .50).
The inferential statistics reported in the results section
include (1) t-tests by means of SPSS 20.0 for Windows to
test for effects of gender, handedness, and the parents’
mother tongue on handwriting measures as well as on or-
thographic skills and visual motor integration; and (2)
structural equation modeling (SEM) by means of AMOS
16 (Arbuckle, 2007) to identify the multivariate relation-
ships between handwriting measures, VMI, and ortho-
graphic skills. SEM was not meant to identify causal rela-
tionships in a strict sense because of the correlational nature
of this study. However, the procedure is an excellent tool
for identifying measurement models as well as multivariate
relationships between variables that can hardly be dis-
cerned via regression analyses. As multivariate normal dis-
tribution is a critical assumption of SEM, we estimated it
using AMOS including all variables which were intended
for the SEM. The result of this procedure was very satis-
factory (multivariate critical ratio = 2.05).
91
Transformation (algorithm) Shapiro-Wilk (after transformation)
p
log(x) .99 (93) .37
1/x .98 (93) .17
1/x2 .98 (93) .23
vx .99 (93) .50
vx .99 (93) .56
2
x .99 (93) .50
x3 .97 (92) .05
Results
In order to rule out the possibility of sampling bias and
third-variable explanations, we (1) compare the group of
students already included in a previous study (see Method
section) with the group of students newly recruited for the
present study and (2) consider the effect of gender, hand-
edness, and parents’ mother tongue on handwriting mea-
sures, VMI, and orthographic skills. Then, we present the
means, standard deviations, and zero-order correlations
among the included continuous variables (Table 2). Finally,
we will present a structural equation model (SEM) connect-
ing handwriting, VMI, and orthographic skills.
Check for Possible Sampling Bias
Comparisons (t-tests) of the group of students included in
a previous study with those newly selected for this study
revealed no group differences in performance on handwrit-
ing measures (FREQ, NIV, PRESS, speed, and legibility),
VMI, or orthographic skills. Therefore, the possibility of
sampling bias was excluded.
Effects of Gender, Handedness, and Parents’
Mother Tongue
We did not find any differences between boys and girls with
respect to legibility, speed, VMI, or orthographic skills.
However, using the transformed variables, we found that
the girls wrote with a higher degree of automation under
time pressure (i.e., lower NIV), t(91) = 2.92, p < .01. None-
theless, we did not find any gender differences in NIV for
the unconstrained 1st trial, for FREQ (over both trials), or
for PRESS (over both trials). In a similar vein, left-handers
performed more poorly than right-handers did with respect
to the NIV over both trials, t(91) = 2.05, p < .05, for the
first trial; t(91) = 3.18, p < .01 for the second trial. Right-
handers also outperformed left-handers with respect to the
frequency of upward and downward strokes (FREQ) when
Swiss J. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
 92 W. Wicki et al.: Handwriting Fluency

Table 2. Mean values, standard deviations, and zero-order correlations of continuous measures
Pearson’s r
Variable M SD 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
(1) LEG 3.56 0.70 .11 .17 .13 .01 –.07 .13 –.01 .13 .25*
(2) Speed# 5.50 0.25 .43** .48** –.04 –.05 .34** .48** .12 .43**
(3) NIV1# 0.50 0.22 .77** –.34** –.33** .91** .71** .06 .25*
(4) NIV2# 0.52 0.23 –.23* –.26** .63** .81** .02 .27**
(5) PRESS1# 1.27 0.28 .90** –.28** –.14 –.04 .03
(6) PRESS2# 1.30 0.26 –.28** –.16 –.07 –.05
(7) FREQ1 2.14 0.60 .75** .10 .27**
(8) FREQ2# 9.78 3.77 .11 .32**
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(9) VMI 23.14 2.84 .35**

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(10) OS# 42321.1 16754.6

Note. Number of transformed values are used (see Table 1). *p < .05, **p < .01. LEG = legibility; Speed = number of letters written in 5 min;
NIV1/NIV2 = number of inversions in velocity, 1st and 2nd trial; PRESS1/PRESS2 = pressure of handwriting, 1st and 2nd trial; FREQ1/FREQ2
= number of upward and downward movements in 1 s, 1st and 2nd trial; VMI = visual-motor integration, OS = orthographic skills. N = 93,
except for OS with N = 92 as one child did not complete the orthographic skills test.

graphic skills while the latter, however, was related to sev-

writing under time pressure (2nd trial, t(91) = 3.26, p < .01),
but not under unconstrained conditions (1st trial: ns). No
differences were found between right- and left-handers
with respect to PRESS, speed, VMI, legibility, or ortho-
graphic skills.
The children of parents whose mother tongue was Ger-
man did not differ from those whose parents’ mother
tongue was not German with respect to the handwriting
measures (NIV, FREQ, PRESS, speed, legibility), but the
former outperformed the latter group with respect to VMI
and orthographic skills, t(91) = 2.19, p < .05, for VMI, and
t(90) = 2.15, p < .05, for orthographic skills.
In summary, we found some differences related to gen-
der and handedness regarding handwriting measures, but
not with respect to orthographic skills or VMI. In contrast,
the parents’ mother tongue was related to their children’s
orthographic skills and VMI, but not to the handwriting
measures used as predictors in the following section.
Therefore, for the purpose of constructing a structural mod-
el predicting orthographic skills by handwriting and VMI,
we decided to neglect the related impact of gender, hand-
edness, and parents’ mother tongue.
Zero-Order Correlations
The zero-order correlations among the continuous mea-
sures of this study are shown in Table 2. They were calcu-
lated using the transformed variables as described in Ta-
ble 1.
It was immediately clear that some handwriting mea-
sures were strongly related to each other, for example, NIV
and FREQ over both trials (Table 2). Similarly, handwriting
speed was related to both NIV and FREQ. PRESS was as-
sociated with NIV, but not with FREQ or speed. Legibility
appeared to be largely independent of the remaining hand-
writing measures and was only weakly related to ortho-
eral handwriting measures. We will focus on the structure
of these complex associations in the following.
Handwriting Automation, Speed, VMI, and
Orthographic Skills: Toward a Structural
Model
We report the structural equation modeling (SEM) of hand-
writing fluency and its correlates in this section. While fo-
cusing on fluency, we decided to exclude legibility because
of its weak or even nonexisting relationship to the fluency
measures. First, to construct a measurement model of writ-
ing fluency, we included the number of inversions of ve-
locity (NIV), pressure on paper (PRESS), and frequency of
upward and downward movements (FREQ) over the two
sentences written on the tablet. Thus, each latent variable
(NIV, PRESS, and FREQ) was measured in the first and
the second tablet trial. From a theoretical point of view, we
assumed that PRESS would be negatively associated with
FREQ and positively associated with NIV, that is, the more
pressure a child exerted on the paper, the slower (FREQ)
and the lower the degree of automation (NIV) with which
he or she would write. Higher automation (NIV) was ex-
pected to be positively related to the frequency of upward
and downward movements. Second, we assumed that chil-
dren with higher levels of automated handwriting (i.e., a
low NIV) would write faster, that is, would be able to write
more letters in 5 min than children with a lower degree of
automation. According to cognitive load theory, automa-
tion of lower processes of handwriting skills saves cogni-
tive resources required to process higher-level tasks such
as recalling orthographic representations or rules. There-
fore, we further assumed that automated handwriting
would be positively related to orthographic skills and that
this association would remain significant even when the

Swiss J. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
 W. Wicki et al.: Handwriting Fluency
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
Figure 1. Automated handwriting as a predictor of hand-
writing speed (N = 92). Variables in squares are observed
variables and those in circles are latent variables. E15–e31
represent error terms. Each single-headed arrow represents
a regression weight. Covariances are drawn with the dou-
ble-headed arrows. The values represent standardized co-
efficients.
model simultaneously takes an additional predictor, name-
ly, VMI, into account. These hypotheses were submitted to
SEM.
The empirical data fit the theoretical model presented in
Figure 1 very well, χ²(21) = 22.27; p = .38; CFI = .998;
RMSEA = .026). While NIV was significantly correlated
with FREQ and PRESS (r = .88 and r = –.28, respectively),
the correlation between PRESS and FREQ (r = –.20) was
not significant. NIV clearly predicted speed of handwriting
(standardized β = .49) and orthographic skills (standardized
β = .22), thus confirming our hypothesis. VMI proved to
be a reliable predictor of orthographic skills (standardized
β = .33), which in turn had an impact on writing speed
(standardized β = .26). Correlations of error terms of NIV
and FREQ for both trials were allowed due to the possibil-
ity that the measurement errors of these variables might be
caused by the same reasons.
In view of the fact that PRESS was only weakly corre-
lated with NIV and FREQ, we calculated an alternative
93
model by omitting PRESS and holding the remaining mod-
el constant. This model yielded an even better fit and a
decreased AIC (Akaike information criterion) value, while
showing nearly the same regression weights. Nevertheless,
due to the very good fit of the initial model, we kept PRESS
for theoretical reasons because pressure is considered to be
an important component of handwriting as explained in the
following.
Discussion
In this study, we aimed to construct a model of handwriting
fluency and predict orthographic skills of 10-year-olds by
handwriting fluency and VMI. In order to rule out the po-
tential effects of gender, handedness, and parents’ mother
tongue, we conducted a series of group comparisons (t-
tests). These analyses discerned that, under time pressure,
girls wrote with a higher degree of automation than boys
did; similarly, we found that left-handers wrote with a low-
er degree of automation (NIV) as well as more slowly in
terms of stroke frequency (FREQ) than right-handers did.
These results only partly confirm the previous findings re-
ported above (e.g., Graham et al., 1998). The new findings
concern the respective differences in automation (NIV),
which were rarely the focus of previous studies. As neither
gender nor handedness was related to orthographic skills
or VMI, we decided to exclude these variables in the fol-
lowing analyses. Similarly, we ruled out the possibility of
bias related to the parents’ mother tongue because of its
association with orthographic skills. Apart from this al-
ready known effect, the parents’ mother tongue was unre-
lated to the remaining variables focused on in this study.
Thus, we also excluded this variable.
According to the manipulation check reported in the
Method section, 10-year-olds were capable of increasing
their automation level (NIV) under time pressure, although
their handwriting is not yet completely automated at this
developmental stage. The latter finding is crucial due to the
need for continuing handwriting training for the first 4
years as suggested by Medwell and Wray (2007). An in-
creased need for handwriting training can also be inferred
from the reduced automaticity levels in left-handers and in
boys found in this study.
The finding that the correlation between handwriting
speed and legibility is very low (Table 2) confirms previous
reports (Graham et al., 1998) and demonstrates that speed
does not necessarily impair legibility.
Concerning SEM, in our view, the identified measure-
ment model of fluency is compelling. The model reveals a
strong association between NIV and stroke frequency as
well as clearly weaker ties between both measures and
PRESS. The fact that PRESS is not correlated with FREQ
in the model is probably due to the near-ideal bandwidth
of pressure that was exerted by almost all of the children
in this study. The result that NIV is a good predictor of
Swiss J. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
 94 W. Wicki et al.: Handwriting Fluency
handwriting speed confirms our assumption that speed is
strongly influenced by automation of the respective hand
and finger movements. Apart from writing quite slowly and
carefully, which makes sense under certain conditions, au-
tomated writing is an important second mode that has to be
trained in schools as well.
Furthermore, the SEM indicated that automation (NIV)
has an impact on orthographic skills, which remained sig-
nificant even when a second predictor of orthographic
skills (i.e., VMI) was included in the model. This is remark-
able against the background of what our hypothesis puts
forward, namely, that handwriting automation saves work-
ing memory resources, which in turn are then available for
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
the higher-order processes necessary for handwriting.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
As reported in the introduction, previous studies identi-
fied VMI as a predictor of academic success in several do-
mains. Accordingly, our finding that the ability to coordi-
nate visual and motor abilities also predicts orthographic
skills is not surprising. However, the exact mechanism of
this association remains largely unclear and additional re-
search that takes probable mediating factors (i.e., intelli-
gence) into account is needed to explore that issue.
The finding that orthographic skills also have an impact
on handwriting speed should not necessarily be interpreted
causally, although it appears plausible to infer that both ad-
vanced knowledge about orthographic rules and access to
the correct spelling of words in memory (Ehri & Rosenthal,
2007) promote fast writing.
The present study has limitations that preclude unambig-
uous conclusions. First, the sample size is just large enough
to meet the minimum requirements of SEM. On the other
hand, according to Hoyle (2011), simulation studies have
demonstrated that a sample size as low as 100 is acceptable
for normally distributed data and small models that fit well.
Second, we measured automation, speed, and ortho-
graphic skills separately. We were therefore not able to
show the contingencies between automation and speed, on
the one hand, and the remaining processes such as orthog-
raphy, on the other hand, online during the writing process
of a child. Therefore, it is difficult to demonstrate a direct
influence of impaired or improved automation on higher-
order processes of writing on the basis of our design.
Future research on the effects of handwriting automation
on higher-order writing processes therefore requires the re-
cording of all of the measures on the digitizing tablet in
order to meet the conditions of a within-subject design
which would allow for online observation of the dynamic
interactions between the different planning and execution
processes of text production and handwriting. This ap-
proach has so far only been applied to the writing of single
words.
Third, the German language has a phonemic orthogra-
phy compared to other languages that have deep orthogra-
phies like English and French (Wimmer, 1995). Therefore,
the results of this study need to be replicated in a sample
that speaks a language with a deep orthography. In our
view, the impact of handwriting automation on orthograph-
Swiss J. Psychol. 73 (2) © 2014 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
ic skills should be even greater for people writing in a lan-
guage with a deep orthography due to the additional cog-
nitive resources that are necessary to do so.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Swiss National Science
Foundation (Grant no. 13DPD3_124564).
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