• 
   Learning how to write : Acquisition of motor skills and orthographic knowledge 
   Writing in deep and shallow orthographies 
   Writing in adults : The interaction between spelling and motor processes 
   Dysgraphia and Dyslexia
   Neural substrates of written language processing 
   New ways of writing : SMS, Chat, Tweets 
  
  

• Speech Research
   Audiovisual speech perception 
   The interaction between perceptual and motor processes 
   Bilingualism, Multilinguism and L2 learning 
   Word recognition 
   Neural substrates of speech processing 
   Specific Language Impairment (SLI) 

Interview MedicalResearch.com  (November 29 2017):  

Kids Who Have Difficulty Spelling Can Have Trouble Writing As Well

Communiqué de presse du CNRS (28 novembre 2017):  

Dyslexie : quand les difficultés en orthographe gênent l'acquisition de l'écriture

La dyslexie est un trouble de l'apprentissage du langage écrit empêchant d'acquérir les automatismes nécessaires aux processus de lecture et d'écriture. De nombreuses études ont eu pour but de comprendre l'origine des difficultés éprouvées par les personnes dyslexiques lors de la lecture. Peu de questions ont, en revanche, été posées quant aux mécanismes de l'écriture. Sonia Kandel, professeure de l'Université Grenoble Alpes au GIPSA-Lab (CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes/Grenoble INP) et ses collègues¹ se sont donc penchés sur l'aspect purement moteur de l'écriture dans le cadre du trouble dyslexique chez l'enfant. Leurs résultats montrent que le déchiffrage de l'orthographe par les enfants dyslexiques est tellement coûteux qu'il finit par modifier ou inhiber le geste d'écriture alors que ces enfants ne sont pas dysgraphiques. Ces travaux ont été publiés dans la revue Cognitive Neuropsychology en novembre 2017.

see our Research Topic in Frontiers in Psychology - Cognitive Science 

Writing words: From brain to hand(s)

Editors : Sonia Kandel & Marieke Longcamp 

Writing is an essential communication tool for living in society, but currently, very little is known on how we write words, and most research on language production has been devoted to speech.
Writing spans from the moment we intend to deliver a linguistic message to the moment we actually execute a complex movement with a pen (or a keyboard). It therefore involves extremely diverse levels of processing. As a consequence, research on writing is approached in very different ways according to the nature of what is being written: text, paragraph, sentence, word, letter, stroke... and distinct models have been proposed to describe the mechanisms underlying these processing levels. Another related consequence is that writing studies involve various but clearly separated scientific communities: cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, movement sciences, educational sciences, and neuroscience and brain imaging. We are convinced that the lack of communication between these approaches harms the progress in writing research.
So the aim of this research topic is to bring together contributions related to writing from a wide range of domains to provide scientists interested in behavioural and neural correlates of language and/or motor control with a more integrated and interactive view. All investigations examining writing processes ˗from cognitive (e.g., spelling recall and lexical access) to motor (e.g. control of letter size or wrist rotation)˗ and their neural correlates are welcome to propose original data, opinions or methods. Contributions considering possible interactions between levels of processing, or addressing a given level with a pluridisciplinary approach, are especially welcome. We are also concerned with questions related to writing disabilities, the relationship between writing and speech production, motor-perceptual interactions and educational research investigating the precursors of writing such as phonological awareness, motor maturation, or visuo-spatial skills.

http://www.frontiersin.org/cognitive_science/researchtopics/writing_words_from_brain_to_ha/964