Titel Deelnemers "Korte inhoud" "Communicating across educational boundaries" "Lisa Hilte, Walter Daelemans, Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "This paper studies linguistic accommodation patterns in a large corpus of private online conversations produced by Flemish secondary school students. We use Poisson models to examine whether the teenagers adjust their writing style depending on their interlocutor's educational profile, while also taking into account the extent to which these adaptation patterns are influenced by the authors' own educational background or by other aspects of their socio-demographic profiles. The corpus does reveal accommodation patterns, but the adjustments do not always mirror variation patterns related to educational profiles. While salient features like expressive markers seem to lead to pattern-matching, less salient features appear less prone to 'adequate' adjustment. Lack of familiarity with the online behavior of students from other educational tracks is a factor too, since online communication clearly proceeds primarily within 'same-education' networks. The focus on cross-educational communication is quite unique in this respect and highly relevant from a sociological perspective." "When correct spelling hardly matters" "Hanne Surkyn, Dominiek Sandra, Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "The present paper examines teenagers’ production and perception of spelling error corrections (e.g., *zij for zei) in online messaging. It discusses both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of spelling corrections in a large corpus of private online conversations between Flemish adolescents and the results of an online survey with a similar target group. Our study reveals that teenagers hardly correct their own spelling errors and those of their peers in informal social media writing. Several factors play a role in whether or not they rectify an error, such as the type of error and their socio-demographic profile. In general, adolescents tend to have a negative attitude towards correcting other people’s spelling mistakes. Consequently, teenagers often perform this face-threatening act (FTA) to tease or irritate their interlocutor or by way of payback for another FTA. Strikingly, even in non-conflictual contexts, errors are generally pointed out quite bluntly, though in some cases, both the error-maker and the interlocutor engage in damage control when the error has been acknowledged by the former. By conducting this research, we can achieve a better understanding of the sociopragmatic mechanisms underlying error perception and error handling in a social media context that generally embraces nonstandard writing." "Towards a more inclusive approach of digital literacy: social media writing at an older age" "Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "We present two complementary pilot studies on older adults’ social media literacy. The first pilot discusses a survey among two generations of older adults, the second is based on family WhatsApp conversations between young adults and their parents. While the survey results show a restricted command of abbreviation strategies and emoji pragmatics, in spite of a clear predilection for emoji, the WhatsApp conversations point to a more elaborate exploitation of emoji functions by the parent generation. Still, older adults’ practices clearly do not always align with those of the younger generations. Both lack of knowledge and dislike of specific online practices seem to be determining factors. The pilots constitute the starting point for a more extensive research project on seniors’ social media literacy which in the end should lead to a more inclusive approach of present-day digital literacy." "De vinger aan de pols van het pluricentrische Nederlands in de Lage Landen" "Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "The research of Dirk Geeraerts and his team has extensively documented, analyzed and discussed the diachronic and synchronic (stylistic) stratification of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, and the relationship between the two. While its relevance for the sociolinguistics of the Low Countries cannot be overestimated, due to its substantive and methodological coherence and rigor, it also transcends Dutch variational linguistics. More specifically, the lectometric approach provides an instrument for measuring the distance between varieties of pluricentric languages and for finetuning the concept of (de)standardization. Finally, the wide variety of case studies produced by Geeraerts and colleagues fuel the debate on the position of (sub)standard Dutch in Flanders." "Laat mij maar lopen langs de strate" "Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "Het artikel exploreert de mogelijkheden van de digitale taalkaartenbank van het Meertensinstituut voor de taalliefhebber die inzicht wil verwerven in bepaalde taalvariatiepatronen." "Too little morphology can kill you" "Dominiek Sandra" "Many orthographies represent the morphological structure of words, i.e., keep the spelling of a morpheme constant despite variability in pronunciation (e.g., cats, dogs). Experimental work strongly suggests that this structure plays a beneficial role in both visual word recognition and spelling. Readers apparently decompose words into their constituent morphemes for the sake of lexical access. Moreover, early on, spellers rely on a word’s morphological structure to derive its spelling (e.g., picked, called). However, morphologically complex words can also be a spelling hurdle, more particularly, when different morphological structures yield different spellings (i.e., morpho-orthographic representations) with the same pronunciation, i.e., grammatical homophones. The error risk on these homophones is codetermined by the token frequencies of the homophones, the rule’s type frequency, and properties of working-memory. The focus in this chapter is on a salient error type in the spelling of Dutch verb homophones but is extended to other languages as well." Experimentation "Dominiek Sandra" "Teenagers and verb spelling" "Hanne Surkyn" "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." "Adolescents and verb spelling" "Hanne Surkyn, Dominiek Sandra, Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "The present paper examines the correlation between adolescents’ gender and educational profile on the one hand and their knowledge of the Dutch verb spelling rules and spelling attitudes on the other hand. A two-part survey was conducted among 451 Flemish students from different educational tracks. We conducted this survey in order to complement our previous research in which we observed social patterns in adolescents’ verb spelling errors on social media (Surkyn et al., 2019, 2020, 2021). Our results reveal that girls and theoretically oriented students care most about correct verb spelling. Moreover, theoretically oriented students have a better knowledge of the verb spelling rules. This survey provides additional evidence for the interpretation of the social patterns in our corpus research on Dutch verb spelling errors." "Lache, Giere, Boeie. The use of insubordinate infinitives in informal computer-mediated communication" "Astrid De Wit, Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "The present paper focuses on the use of insubordinate infinitives in social media writing produced by Flemish adolescents. It combines insights from usage-based, cross-linguistic research on insubordination with expertise in the sociolinguistics of online communication. We demonstrate how insubordinate infinitives, in view of their evaluative and discursive functions, find a perfect breeding ground in informal online communication and how this particular context pushes the insubordinate infinitives into notably advanced evolutionary stages."