I know the difference between "its" and "it's". When I read it, even in my own writing, I can see incorrect usages almost instantly. However, when I type, I often type "it's" when I should write "its." The opposite problem is rare ("its" when it should be "it's"). I don't even notice that I've written it incorrectly unless I proof-read my writing.
So, why do I do this?
I've looked at these questions and answers:
Why do you sometimes write down one word while actually intending to write another?
What type of learning mechanism produces a consistent typo?
But neither really seem to address this case. The first accepted answer refers to speech errors and centers around sounds and phonemes. Since there isn't anything phonetically different between "it's" and "its" I can't see how I have stumbled into this problem:
When mentally planning the next word in a sentence, we must choose the appropriate lemma. By selecting the units in a neural network that correspond to a certain lemma, it spreads activation to the corresponding morphemes, which in turn spreads activation to its corresponding phonemes. When the activation of a phoneme unit exceeds a certain threshold, it is selected for utterance (e.g., spreads activation to the motor units that allow us to speak).
The second answer refers specifically to mechanical typing errors arising from looking at text (which I am not doing) and striking the wrong key. These errors don't seem to cover my situation:
- Salthouse mentions the taxonomy of typing errors proposed by Wells (1916) of "substitutions, intrusions, ommissions, and transpositions", and also cites empirical estimates of prevalence of
different types of errors.- "Many substitution errors involve adjacent keys."
- "Most transposition errors are cross-hand rather than within-hand"
My problem is adding unnecessary punctuation and not a mechanical error or phonetic/psycholinguistic error. Am I wrong?
