Undergraduate study finds texting doesn’t handicap spelling ability

Dan McKechnie

OMG UGRD RSRCH The wide array of abbreviations and acronyms utilized in text messaging and online chats is thought of as a new form of communication.

A study conducted at the University of Alberta on the effects of instant messaging on teens’ spelling has been making headlines since its publication in May, but one detail that has been attracting less attention is that the researchers were in fact undergraduate psychology students.

“They were just curious, and they were very successful,” said Connie Varnhagen, a professor in the Department of Psychology, who supervised the study along with graduate teaching assistant Peggy McFall.

The research was both initiated and conducted by three undergraduates from a Psychology 323 (Perceptual and Cognitive Development) class in the fall of 2007, namely Nicole Pugh, Lisa Routledge. and Heather Sumida-Macdonald. At the beginning of the semester, the students were asked to come up with a research project idea, and this one caught Varnhagen’s attention.

The study itself involved the analysis of instant messages sent by 40 teenage students — mostly siblings of the psychology class members — over the course of a week, and a standardized spelling test written by each of the subjects.

Pugh, Routledge, and Sumida-Macdonald then spent the summer of 2008 analyzing the data and creating a "chatspeak" (as the slang spelling is being called) taxonomy. What they determined defied the common misconception that chatspeak would negatively impact spelling.

“Contrary to what the media and parents might argue, spelling ability was not highly correlated with new language use in instant messaging,” the group reported in their lab write-up.

Linguistic and educational implications aside, the study opens up a whole new set of questions in which other researchers are starting to take interest. Varnhagen herself is considering the effect that chatspeak may have on different mediums of communication. Other points of interest are the gender differences in chatspeak use (boys tended to use excessive punctuation and vulgarity, while girls abbreviate avidly), and the fact that commonly misspelled words fared better in chatspeak ("shoulda" was never spelled phonetically as "shuda").

“We prefer to view electronic communication as both a new, complementary language to conventional written language and a natural experiment in the development of written communication,” the students reported.

That these students were able to publish their study as undergraduates is a significant feat in itself. This sort of hands-on research experience, while being extremely beneficial for those considering graduate school, is nevertheless difficult to attain for most undergrads, with the exception of honours students. The task becomes impossible without the proper infrastructure such as qualified research advisors and funding.

“They managed to pull it off beautifully,” Varnhagen said in regards to the students’ work.

Fortunately for this team of researchers, those usual obstacles did not apply. Varnhagen and McFall provided advice on ethics and helped in writing the final manuscript. Funding was unnecessary to conduct the investigation.

The study was published by the Journal of Reading and Writing on May 2 under the title "Lol: new language and spelling in instant messaging."