Adolescents with dyslexia dysorthographia have some phonological skill deficiency and/or visual-attention deficit. Knowing that these same skills are required to use SMS codes, the main objective of this study is to understand how these subjects use texting language. To understand this, we compared the SMSs of adolescents with dyslexia dysorthographia with the SMSs of typical writers in a dictation task. We analyzed the number and the type of SMS codes used by the subjects. This study shows less use of SMS codes in quantitative terms in adolescents with dyslexia dysorthographia (DD), but globally equivalent use in terms of quality, in comparison with normal writers.

The increased use of digital writing led to the appearance of written content that may differ from the standards of spelling. Writing instant messages leads to the production of two different types of written forms that differ from standard spelling: (a) those that can be confused with misspellings and (b) those that cannot. We showed that the production of the second type of modifications has no effect on spelling production. Our research protocol allowed comparing two corpora (written in 1974 and 2012). These results showed that when a modification has no orthographic equivalent, its use cannot damage the quality of spelling production. When it does, the effect on spelling may be negative.