Eye movements when reading text messaging (txt msgng)

Abstract

The growing popularity of mobile-phone technology has led to changes in the way people—particularly younger people—communicate. A clear example of this is the advent of Short Message Service (SMS) language, which includes orthographic abbreviations (e.g., omitting vowels, as in wk, week) and phonetic respelling (e.g., using u instead of you). In the present study, we examined the pattern of eye movements during reading of SMS sentences (e.g., my hols wr gr8), relative to normally written sentences, in a sample of skilled “texters”. SMS sentences were created by using (mostly) orthographic or phonological abbreviations. Results showed that there is a reading cost—both at a local level and at a global level—for individuals who are highly expert in SMS language. Furthermore, phonological abbreviations resulted in a greater cost than orthographic abbreviations.

Keywords:

• Normal reading
• Orthographic processing
• Eye movements

Acknowledgments

The research reported in this article has been partially supported by Grants PSI2008–04069/PSIC, SEJ2006–09238, and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 (CSD2008–00048) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. We are indebted to Miguel Pérez Subías for providing us a list of word frequencies from the Short Message Service (SMS) dictionary in Spanish. We also thank Denis Drieghe, Marc Brysbaert, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Notes

¹ We should note here that in the past years, a number of mobile phone models come with a full keyboard for SMS messaging.

² In four cases, we chose the last word as the critical word, because it was the only one to fit the orthographic or phonological criterion.

³ We thank Denis Drieghe for suggesting this analysis.