Disfluencies in writing - are they like in speaking?

This paper presents a study of disfluencies in written language production. Texts from ten university students are compared to data from people who almost never use writing, namely adult dyslexics and to texts from people who communicate in writing under real-time constraints every day, namely deaf whose main use of writing is text telephone conversations. This paper investigates which types of disfluencies occur in writing, where they occur and their durations. Further, this paper investigates how different text types and the specific characteristics of deaf and dyslexic writers influence the distribution of disfluencies. The results are discussed in relation to earlier work on disfluencies in speaking.