Quote:
Originally Posted by tdvance
Essentially, it was that you could be typing, and anything could interrupt the train of thought, but since the brain continues to play the sound of the word in your head, you "hear" the sound and type what you hear instead of what you mean, then possibly recover your train of thought and continue (either that or notice the mistake right there).
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This is the most plausible explanation for native and near-native speakers IMO. In spoken language (including that which is silently, mentally spoken as we type), all of the generative transformations from meaning to syntax to phonetic representation occur well before the words are transcribed. Though I do not have a name for the condition (my linguistics training is, oh, 30 years behind me), tdvance's explanation sounds, um, sound. The writing trails the mental speech act enough that the most frequently used representation of the homonyms outweighs the proper one. Guess that's why there's no escaping from proof-reading, even for the most literate.