£83,850, Royal Society This project aligns theory and writing assessment, with a specific focus on the cognitive underpinnings of writing, thereby providing a framework for developing specific assessment procedures to capture writing dimensions and identifying students’ strengths and weaknesses. The project’s cross-linguistic perspective, involving different orthographies, will enhance our understanding of the complex relationships between language, cognition, and literacy. Data will inform cognitive models of the writing process, education and educational neuroscience (Richards, Berninger, Stock, Altemeier, Travedi & Maravilla, 2011). Goals of the project 1)To evaluate alternative models of the structure of individual differences in writing in different developmental stages. 2)To explore possible differences across orthographies with different degrees of transparency: English, Catalan and Spanish. 3)To assess the separate contribution of a) components of the text (vocabulary, grammar and discourse organization), b) transcriptional skills (spelling and handwriting fluency) and c) aspects of the online compositional process (pauses, self-corrections) to text quality. 4)To determine the contribution of oral language component (receptive vocabulary and vocabulary richness) to writing quality.