The present study investigated the way people acquire and control skilled performance in the context of typewriting. Typing skill was degraded by changing the location of a key (target key) while retaining the locations of other keys to disable an association between the letter and the key. We conducted 4 experiments: Experiment 1 demonstrated that disabling a letter-key association affected not only the execution of the target keystroke but also the planning of other keystrokes for words involving the target key. In Experiments 2-4, typists practiced with a new target location and then transferred to a condition in which they typed the practiced words with the original key location (Experiment 2) or typed new words with the practiced key location (Experiments 3 and 4). Experiment 2 showed that the newly acquired letter-key association interfered with the execution of the original keystroke but not planning. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that acquisition of the new letter-key association depended on multiple levels of linguistic units. Experiment 4 demonstrated that acquisition of the new association depended on sequences both before and after the target keystroke. We discuss implications of the results for 2 prominent approaches to modeling sequential behavior: hierarchical control and recurrent network models.