If it were not for the almost universal conventionalism of the emojis, a text message would be very difficult to interpret in its true intention: the issuer sends it with an intention and who receives it reads it with its own voice and in the middle, a strange scratched phone game.
According to a recent study led by Celia Klin from the University of Binghamton, the textisms such as Add a point after each word or put each word in your own text bubble, can transmit emotion and intensity.
Celia Klin, a psychologist at the University of Binghamton, had previously published two studies (in 2015 and 2017) on the inclusion of a point after texts in a single word: Okay. Yeah. No. Instead of using grammatically, to indicate that a sentence was complete, as would be the case of a more formal writing, The points used after a single word in a text message were understood as rhetorically used, to add meaning.
In the new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, Klin’s team analyzed two new textisms. They asked groups of university students to examine a series of text exchanges and They would qualify the degree of disgust or frustration that they thought the author of the messages felt.
The first type of textism was to include a point after each word. While the second type of textism put each word of the message was sent as an independent message. In both cases, it was understood that these textisms added emotional intensity to messages.
“Those who send text messages are much more limited than speakers when transmitting important social and pragmatic information -Klin explains in a statement -. Textisms, such as irregular score and deliberate spelling errors, are sometimes used to replace multimodal signals, such as tone of voice and gestureswhich are available in spoken language. Fundamentally, our findings indicate that text receptors often interpret textisms as intended, as if they transmitted emotion and intensity. ”
In an oral conversation, We hope that the contributions of our interlocutor are significant instead of randomthe problem, the authors point out, is that we expect the same meaning in text messages.
“Readers assume that The decision to include a textism also communicates a meaning -Klin adds -. Including them specified from a specific job and assume that this was deliberate and therefore pay more attention. ”
Klin said that more research is needed to investigate the variety of factors that influence the understanding of textisms. The findings could be different in more formal communicative environments, such as between an employee and a boss. He also pointed out that This study only examined texts that transmitted negative emotions and that a broader range of materials should be examined, as well as the individual characteristics of the readers.
Although it is speculative, Klin and his colleagues conclude that the readers understood the two textisms that They examined as a pause, perhaps imitating the vocal prosody of a dramatic pause.
“You can imagine that readers ‘listened to’ the presence of a point after each word as an broken speech -Klin concludes. The same can be said of the second textism we examine, in which words are read once in individual text bubbles. It has been discovered that Pauses in spoken language have important communicative functions. Therefore, it would not be surprising that text message users have found a way to communicate pauses too. ”