Reasons for Texting Questionnaire

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

“…Research has found that Chinese net-speak experience facilitates the recognition and processing of Chinese standard words (Chen et al, 2020). In summary, studies of both Chinese and English language materials have found that the more frequently the net-speak is used, the more beneficial it is for the recognition of standard words (Plester et al, 2009;Kemp and Bushnell, 2011;Blom et al, 2017). The present study also confirms this finding.…”

“…The net-speak (texism) used by children in chatting often has a different style from standard language. English net-speak is generally abbreviated, using different forms of orthographic or phonological abbreviations (Waldron et al, 2015;Blom et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2020), such as contractions (e.g., msg for message), phonological abbreviations (e.g., thru for through), initialisms (e.g., omg for oh my God), shortenings (e.g., goin for going), single letters (e.g., u for you), combined letters (e.g., 2 day for today), and accent stylizations (e.g., gonna for going to). Plester et al (2009) have pointed out that people experienced in net-speak themselves may have a high level of language sensitivity and ability, which is the reason why they are interested in net-speak words and use them creatively.…”

“…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. A number of studies have examined the relationship between children's use of textisms and normative literacy, but most of them have demonstrated that children who use textisms more often score higher on literacy-related assessments (Waldron et al, 2015;Blom et al, 2017); these literacy skills include: word reading (Plester et al, 2009;Coe and Oakhill, 2011), phonological awareness (Plester et al, 2009;Wood et al, 2014) and spelling (Plester et al, 2009;Bushnell et al, 2011;Wood et al, 2014). Most textisms appear to be homophonous variant of standard English vocabularies, which implies that, for net-speak experienced speakers, English net-speak is closely related to standard words in the individual's psychological vocabularies, so that high proficiency in English net-speak implies high proficiency in standard English.…”