Does Net-Speak Experience Interfere With the Processing of Standard Words? Evidence From Net-Speak Word Recognition and Semantic Decisions

Abstract

The relationship between Chinese net-speak use and traditional literacy has rarely been discussed in the literature. In this study, we conducted two experiments to explore the effects of net-speak experience on word recognition and semantic decisions. A sample of senior middle school students was divided into a high-experience group and a low-experience group according to the students' net-speak experience, and the Go/No-Go task (Experiment 1) was adopted to investigate the differences between the two groups in the recognition of pure net-speak words and standard words. The results showed that the response time (RT) of participants was longer for pure net-speak word recognition than for standard word recognition. In addition, for both types of words, the recognition RT of participants in the high-experience group was shorter than that of participants in the low-experience group, but the accuracy (ACC) of pure net-speak word recognition was higher. Taking dual semantic net-speak words with both net-speak meaning and traditional meaning as priming stimuli and standard words related to the two meanings as targets, a semantic decision task (Experiment 2) was used to explore the differences between the two groups in judgments of the semantic relationship between the target words and priming words. The results showed that the decision ACC of participants in the high-experience group for both kinds of meaning-related words was significantly higher than that of participants in the low-experience group. The decision RT of participants in the high-experience group was slightly shorter for netspeak meaning-related words than traditional meaning-related words. The decision RT and ACC of participants in the low-experience group for both kinds of meaning-related words were equivalent. This shows that for Chinese teenagers, net-speak use may not disturb the processing of standard words; on the contrary, it may enhance processing.

Contextual Information Helps Understand Messages Written with Textisms

“…As we anticipated, textism significantly increased the response time of participants in our experiment. This was consistent with the results found in previous studies [27][28][29]. Yet, the impact of messages written in textism seemed to have decreased when they were used in a second conversation following a conversation with a more traditional spelling.…”

“…Studies exploring cognitive cost in the use of textisms are few, but they seem to indicate that the use of textisms is correlated with an increase in reading time and also has an effect on some measures linked to cognitive effort: studies using eye-trackers indicate that more fixations are made on sentences that contain textisms and that fixations last significantly longer than with sentences containing standard English [27,28]. Similar results were observed between Chinese Net-Speak and standard Chinese, with Net-Speak increasing the response time during a task of text recognition [29].…”

Internet use predicts Chinese character spelling performance of junior high school students: multiple mediating roles of pinyin input proficiency and net-speak experience

“…In terms of teens’ net-speak usage style, English net-speak is mostly used in abbreviated form, called textism ( Chen et al, 2020 ). As textisms are informal (unconventional spelling and grammatical shortcuts) and differ significantly from standardized English words or phrases in terms of orthography and spelling rules, there is concern that the long-term use of textisms may have a negative impact on children’s normative literacy skills.…”

“…The latter is more of an abbreviated form of standard English, while the former is more of codified characters or Chinese standard characters that extend new meanings on the Internet. That is, old words are endowed with new implications ( Chen et al, 2020 ). Studies have also shown that the use of net-speak seems to be beneficial to Chinese character processing ( Chen et al, 2020 ), which implies that the use of Pinyin input method and net-speak style in Internet activities by Chinese children may be beneficial to their mastery of standardized Chinese character spelling.…”

Uses and Abuses of Netspeak

“…Moreover, Thangaraj and Maniam (2015) have considered Netspeak problematic while producing in the formal settings, otherwise it is a habitual practice among youngsters. Then Chen et al, (2020) in their research have experimented on senior middle school students to investigate the recognition of pure Netspeak words and academic terms where they divided the sample into two groups: high experience group and low experience group of participants using Netspeak. The results have shown that the response time of the high experience group for Netspeak meaning-related words was slightly shorter than the traditional meaning-related words and the response time of the low experience group of participants was equivalent for both kinds of meaning-related words.…”