Interlocutors’ Age Impacts Teenagers’ Online Writing Style: Accommodation in Intra- and Intergenerational Online Conversations

Abstract

The present study examines how teenagers adapt their language use to that of their conversation partner (i.e., the linguistic phenomenon of accommodation) in interactions with peers (intragenerational communication) and with older interlocutors (intergenerational communication). We analyze a large corpus of Flemish teenagers’ conversations on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which appear to be highly peer-oriented. With Poisson models, we examine whether the teenage participants adjust their writing style to older interlocutors. The same trend emerges for three sets of prototypical markers of the informal online genre: teenagers insert significantly fewer of these markers when interacting with older interlocutors, thus matching their interlocutors’ style and increasing linguistic similarity. Finally, the analyses reveal subtle differences in accommodation patterns for the distinct linguistic variables with respect to the impact of the teenagers’ sociodemographic profiles and their interlocutors’ age.

How is Linguistic Accommodation Perceived in Instant Messaging? A Survey on Teenagers’ Evaluations and Perceptions

“…higher) scores in the detection tasks are not likely to be explained by a coincidental lower (resp. higher) degree of convergence in the example messages shown in these tasks: we previously observed strong accommodation patterns in the reference corpus among interlocutors who differ from each other in terms of gender, age, or educational track (Hilte et al, 2020b(Hilte et al, , 2021a(Hilte et al, , 2021b. And the detection tasks use random samples from the corpus that should thus reflect this.…”

“…We created an online survey 2 to complement our previous research on teenagers' production of accommodative adjustments in instant messages (Hilte et al, 2020b(Hilte et al, , 2021a(Hilte et al, , 2021b with findings on their attitudes and perceptions concerning the phenomenon. The respondents were secondary school pupils (see below for more information) who filled out the survey on a school computer or their own smartphone.…”

“…The survey consisted of multiple question blocks focusing on accommodation in instant messaging on popular platforms such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The selection of the linguistic and socio-demographic variables that are the focus of the survey was based on our previous work, as we observed significant mirroring in the reference corpus concerning these variables (Hilte et al, 2020b(Hilte et al, , 2021a(Hilte et al, , 2021b. And the instant messages in the survey were selected randomly from the reference corpus, with some constraints (described below).…”

“…The phenomenon of accommodation, i.e., people adapting their communicative behavior to (that of) their interlocutor, has been widely investigated in spoken face-to-face interactions, and to a minor extent in online conversations (see below for a literature overview). We previously showed how youths adapt their writing style on chat apps such as WhatsApp, resulting in a style more similar to their interlocutor's (Hilte et al, 2020b(Hilte et al, , 2021a(Hilte et al, , 2021b). But we do not yet know how they perceive their own and their peers' accommodative behavior.…”

Happiness and Sadness in Adolescents’ Instagram Direct Messaging: A Neural Topic Modelling Approach

“…To our knowledge, eight earlier studies have analyzed the content of social media DMs, with diverging aims. Four studies investigated the linguistic characteristics of adolescents' DMs on both WhatsApp and Facebook (Hilte et al, 2021;Hilte et al, 2018Hilte et al, , 2020Surkyn et al, 2021).…”