Written Communication Jul 2020

Lexical Patterns in Adolescents’ Online Writing: The Impact of Age, Gender, and Education

Lisa Hilte University of Antwerp ; Walter Daelemans University of Antwerp ; Reinhild Vandekerckhove University of Antwerp

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the sociodemographic profile (including age, gender, and educational track) of Flemish adolescents (aged 13–20) on lexical aspects of their informal online discourse. The focus on lexical and more “traditional,” print-based aspects of literacy is meant to complement previous research on sociolinguistic variation with respect to the use of prototypical features of social media writing. Drawing on a corpus of 434,537 social media posts written by 1,384 teenagers, a variety of lexical features and related parameters is examined, including lexical richness, top favorite words, and word length. The analyses reveal a strong common ground among the adolescents with respect to some features but divergent writing practices by different groups of teenagers with regard to other parameters. Furthermore, this study analyzes both standardized versions of social media messages and the original utterances (including nonstandard markers of online writing). Strikingly, different results emerge with respect to adolescents’ exploitation of more traditional versus digital literacy skills in relation to their sociodemographic profile, especially with respect to sentiment expression (verbal versus typographic/pictorial). The study suggests that the inclusion of nonverbal communicative strategies, for instance in language teaching, might be a pedagogical asset, since these strategies are eagerly adopted by teenagers who show proof of less developed traditional writing skills.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2020-07-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088320917921
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
discourse analysis writing pedagogy teacher development digital rhetoric social media literacy studies gender and writing
Export
BibTeX RIS

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

References (50) · 1 in this index

  1. Androutsopoulos J. (2011)
    Standard languages and language standards in a changing Europe
  2. Argamon S., Koppel M., Pennebaker J. W., Schler J. (2009). Automatically profiling the author of an anonymous…
     ↗
  3. Bamman D., Eisenstein J., Schnoebelen T. (2014). Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journ…
     ↗
  4. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313055.003.0004
     ↗
  5. Bates D., Maechler M., Bolker B., Walker S. (2017). Package “lme4.” https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/l…
Show all 50 →
  1. De Clercq O. (2013)
    Proceedings of the international conference recent advances in natural language processin…
  2. De Decker B., Vandekerckhove R. (2017). Global features of online communication in local Flemish: Social and …
     ↗
  3. De Smedt T. (2012)
    Journal of Machine Learning Research
  4. De Smedt T. (2012)
    Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (…
  5. Drouin M., Driver B. (2014). Texting, textese and literacy abilities: A naturalistic study. Journal of Resear…
     ↗
  6. Eckert P. (1997)
    The handbook of sociolinguistics
  7. Finlay S. C. (2014). Age and gender in Reddit commenting and success. Journal of Information Science Theory a…
     ↗
  8. Flemish Ministry of Education and Training (2018)
    Statistisch jaarboek van het Vlaams onderwijs. Schooljaar 2016 -2017 [Statistical yearboo…
  9. Frey J.-C. (2018)
    Proceedings of the 6th conference on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social med…
  10. Han B., Cook P., Baldwin T. (2013). Lexical normalization for social media text. ACM Transactions on Intellig…
     ↗
  11. Herring S. C. (in press). Grammar and electronic communication. In Chapelle C. (Ed.), The concise encyclopedi…
  12. Hilte L., Vandekerckhove R., Daelemans W. (2018a). Adolescents’ social background and non-standard writing in…
     ↗
  13. Hilte L., Vandekerckhove R., Daelemans W. (2018b). Expressive markers in online teenage talk: A correlational…
     ↗
  14. Hilte L. (2018)
    International Journal of Society, Culture & Language
  15. Hilte L., Vandekerckhove R., Daelemans W. (2019). Adolescents’ perceptions of social media writing: Has non-s…
     ↗
  16. Hilte L.
    Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik
  17. Hogenboom A. (2015)
    Journal of Web Engineering
  18. Holmes J. (1992)
    An introduction to sociolinguistics
  19. Labov W. (1972)
    Sociolinguistic patterns
  20. Lillis T., McMullan J., Tuck J. (2018). Gender and academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes…
     ↗
  21. Lin J. (2007). Automatic author profiling of online chat logs (Master’s thesis). Naval Postgraduate School. h…
  22. Malvern D., Richards B. (2012). Measures of lexical richness. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. htt…
     ↗
  23. Mehl M. R., Pennebaker J. W. (2003). The sounds of social life: A psychometric analysis of students’ daily so…
     ↗
  24. Newman M. L., Groom C. J., Handelman L. D., Pennebaker J. W. (2008). Gender differences in language use: An a…
     ↗
  25. Nguyen D. A., Doğruöz S., Rosé C. P., de Jong F. (2016). Computational sociolinguistics: A survey. Computatio…
     ↗
  26. Peterson et al. (2012)
    Gender and Literacy Issues and Research: Placing the Spotlight on Writing
    Journal of Writing Research
  27. 10.1017/CBO9780511732942
     ↗
  28. Ruette T. (2014)
    Pluricentricity: Language variation and sociocognitive dimensions
  29. Sankoff D., Lessard R. (1975). Vocabulary richness: A sociolinguistic analysis. Science, 190(4215), 689–690. …
     ↗
  30. Schwartz H. A., Eichstaedt J. C., Kern M. L., Dziurzynski L., Ramones S. M., Agrawal M., Shah A., Kosinski M.…
     ↗
  31. Singh S. (2001). A pilot study on gender differences in conversational speech on lexical richness measures. L…
     ↗
  32. Tagliamonte S. (2016). So sick or so cool? The language of the youth on the internet. Language in Society, 45…
     ↗
  33. Tomita D. K. (2009)
    Proceedings of technology, colleges and community (TCC) 2009
  34. Vandekerckhove R., Sandra D. (2016). De potentiële impact van informele online communicatie op de spellingpra…
     ↗
  35. Van der Goot R., Van Noord G. (2017). MoNoise: Modeling noise using a modular normalization system. ArXiv pre…
  36. Van Hout R., Vermeer A. (2007). Comparing measures of lexical richness. In Daller H., Milton J., Treffers-Dal…
     ↗
  37. Varnhagen C. K., McFall G. P., Pugh N., Routledge L., Sumida-MacDonald H., Kwong T. E. (2010). Lol: New langu…
     ↗
  38. Verheijen L. (2015)
    Proceedings of the second postgraduate and academic researchers in linguistics at York (P…
  39. Verheijen L. (2016)
    Proceedings of the 4th conference on CMC and social media corpora for the humanities
  40. Verheijen L. (2018)
    Is textese a threat to traditional literacy? Dutch youths’ language use in written comput…
  41. Verheijen L. (2017)
    Proceedings of the 5th conference on CMC and social media corpora for the humanities (cmc…
  42. Vermeer A. (2000). Coming to grips with lexical richness in spontaneous speech data. Language Testing, 17(1),…
     ↗
  43. Vlaams Verbond van het Katholiek Secundair Onderwijs (2006)
    Dutch third cycle Vocational Secondary Education. Curriculum secondary education
  44. Vlaams Verbond van het Katholiek Secundair Onderwijs (2014)
    Dutch third degree aso-kso-tso. Secondary education curriculum
  45. Yu G. (2009). Lexical diversity in writing and speaking task performances. Applied Linguistics, 31(2), 236–25…
     ↗
CrossRef global citation count: 14 View in citation network → Build reading path →

Related Articles

  1. Pedagogy Jan 2022
    Contributors ↗
    modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism genre theory discourse analysis african american rhetorics decolonial rhetorics first-year composition writing pedagogy basic writing writing across the curriculum graduate education teacher development argument collaborative writing transfer assessment portfolios writing program administration writing centers peer tutoring technical communication professional writing archival research digital rhetoric social media grammar and mechanics literacy studies race and writing gender and writing disability studies public rhetoric community literacy literary studies editorial matter
  2. Pedagogy Apr 2025
    Contributors ↗
    modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism african american rhetorics cultural rhetorics first-year composition writing pedagogy basic writing graduate education two-year college teacher development writing centers technical communication professional writing labor and working conditions digital rhetoric multimodality social media literacy studies race and writing gender and writing community literacy literary studies editorial matter
  3. Pedagogy Oct 2021
    Contributors ↗
    rhetorical criticism discourse analysis writing pedagogy graduate education two-year college teacher development collaborative writing transfer assessment labor and working conditions multimodality social media online writing instruction multilingual writers literacy studies race and writing gender and writing public rhetoric community literacy affect and writing literary studies editorial matter
  4. College Composition and Communication Oct 1992
    Discourse and Diversity: Experimental Writing within the Academy ↗
    Lillian Bridwell-Bowles
    modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism discourse analysis writing pedagogy writing across the curriculum teacher development digital rhetoric literacy studies race and writing gender and writing
  5. Computers and Composition Dec 2024
    “Wayfinding” through the AI wilderness: Mapping rhetorics of ChatGPT prompt writing on X (formerly Twitter) to promote critical AI literacies ↗
    Anuj Gupta; Ann Shivers-McNair
    rhetorical criticism writing pedagogy teacher development qualitative research digital rhetoric social media artificial intelligence literacy studies community literacy