Crunching Big Data with Fingertips: How Typists Tune Their Performance Toward the Statistics of Natural Language
Lawrence P. Behmer Jr. and Matthew J. C. Crump · Psychology Press eBooks · 2016
The infinite monkey theorem says a room full of monkeys typing letters on a keyboard for infinity will eventually produce any text, like the works of Shakespeare or this chapter (Borel, 1913). This small space of natural texts has more predictable structure than the many other random texts produced by the typing monkeys. For example, letters and bigrams that occur in English appear with particular frequencies, some high and some low. The present work examines whether typists, who routinely produce letters by manipulating a keyboard, become sensitive to these statistical aspects of the texts they type. Answering this question addresses debate about how people learn to produce serially ordered actions (Lashley, 1951).