Teenagers and verb spelling

Subtitle:not their cup of d/tea? A psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective on the production and perception of Dutch homophone errors in private social media messages

In this doctoral thesis, we combined a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspective to study the potential interaction of social and mental processes in the production of spelling errors. Specifically, we analyzed errors produced by adolescents in Dutch verb homophones, i.e., verb forms that are pronounced in the same way but spelled differently (e.g., vind-vindt, ‘find-finds’). In addition, we examined partially homophonous verb forms, i.e., past participles that end in a Digital and are partially homophonous with other inflectional forms in the verbal paradigm (e.g., genoemd-noemt, ‘named-names’). We investigated the role of both psycholinguistic frequency factors and social variables. The analyses were based on a unique corpus of over 400,000 private posts produced by Flemish adolescents on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Our corpus studies showed that teenagers’ socio-demographic profile has an impact on the number of verb spelling errors they produce, but not on the error pattern. For example, most errors are made in the lower-frequency form of a homophone pair (e.g., vind instead of vindt), regardless of adolescents’ social profile. Furthermore, teenagers produce more errors in partially homophonous verb forms (e.g., genoemt instead of genoemd, ‘named’) with a smaller support for the correct Digital spelling both in the verb’s inflectional paradigm and in verb-final bigrams. However, the chat messages of boys, younger teenagers (15-16 years old) and students from technical and professional education (the more practice-oriented tracks) contain significantly more spelling errors in (partially) homophonous verb forms than those of girls, older teenagers (17-20 years old) and students from general education (the more theoretical tracks). These social patterns, as shown by our survey conducted among teenagers, can be linked to differences in both spelling attitudes and rule mastery. Moreover, the corpus analyses showed an effect of the interlocutor’s gender on the part of the older girls (17-20-y-o): They converged towards the less standard spelling of their male interlocutors, producing more errors while chatting with boys than while conversing with girls. Finally, this study demonstrated that spelling errors are highly tolerated in private messages and are consequently rarely corrected. Still, adolescents’ socio-demographic profile and the type of errors play a role in whether or not spelling errors are corrected. Together, our findings make clear why the informal online communication of most Flemish teenagers is riddled with verb spelling errors, why some errors occur more frequently than others, and why error corrections are nearly absent. On a more general level, they show that the interdisciplinary, i.e., combined psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic, approach definitely pays off.

Publication year:2022

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Closed