Does Net-Speak Experience Interfere With the Processing of Standard Words? Evidence From Net-Speak Word Recognition and Semantic Decisions

The relationship between Chinese net-speak use and traditional literacy has rarely been discussed in the literature. In this study, we conducted two experiments to explore the effects of net-speak experience on word recognition and semantic decisions. A sample of senior middle school students was divided into a high-experience group and a low-experience group according to the students’ net-speak experience, and the Go/No-Go task (Experiment 1) was adopted to investigate the differences between the two groups in the recognition of pure net-speak words and standard words. The results showed that the response time (RT) of participants was longer for pure net-speak word recognition than for standard word recognition. In addition, for both types of words, the recognition RT of participants in the high-experience group was shorter than that of participants in the low-experience group, but the accuracy (ACC) of pure net-speak word recognition was higher. Taking dual semantic net-speak words with both net-speak meaning and traditional meaning as priming stimuli and standard words related to the two meanings as targets, a semantic decision task (Experiment 2) was used to explore the differences between the two groups in judgments of the semantic relationship between the target words and priming words. The results showed that the decision ACC of participants in the high-experience group for both kinds of meaning-related words was significantly higher than that of participants in the low-experience group. The decision RT of participants in the high-experience group was slightly shorter for net-speak meaning-related words than traditional meaning-related words. The decision RT and ACC of participants in the low-experience group for both kinds of meaning-related words were equivalent. This shows that for Chinese teenagers, net-speak use may not disturb the processing of standard words; on the contrary, it may enhance processing.