Contextual information helps understand messages written with textisms

Abstract

The present study investigated the influence of the use of textisms, a form of written language used in phone-mediated conversations, on the cognitive cost of French participants in an online conversation. Basing our thinking on the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson, we tried to assess whether knowing the context and topic of a conversation can produce a significant decrease in the cognitive cost required to read messages written in textism by giving additional clues to help infer the meaning of these messages. In order to do so, participants played the judges in a Turing test between a normal conversation (written with the traditional writing style) and a conversation in which the experimenter was conversing with textisms, in a random order. The results indicated that participants answered messages written in textism faster when they were in the second conversation. We concluded that prior knowledge about the conversation can help interpret the messages written in textisms by decreasing the cognitive cost required to infer their meaning.