GR8!! Is this actually a word?
Do the brains of the texting generation recognise abbreviations and acronyms such as BRB and LOL as words or as abbreviations? And do they still consider the 8 in GR8 a number? Psycholinguist Dr Lesya Ganushchak will be researching this subject in Birmingham, funded by a Rubicon subsidy.
Sesame Street
Is it a letter? Or a number? And if it's a letter, which one?' These are the words of a well-known Sesame Street song. Life is relatively simple for the Sesame Street audience: a letter is a letter and a number is a number. You are taught to read with letters, and you do arithmetic with numbers.
Internet shorthand
But once these same children have successfully begged their parents to buy them their first mobile phones, the principle apparently no longer applies. Numbers, but also letters with a somewhat multi-functional sound, are effortlessly incorporated into texting and internet shorthand which has now become the youth culture's current language style. This is a culture which has become peppered with letter-number combinations such as GR8 and 4U and abbreviations as LOL (Laughing Out Loud) and BRB (Be Right Back).
Psycholinguist
Psycholinguist Lesya Ganushchak finds it intriguing: how do our brains actually recognise and produce the result of that number 8 in the context of GR8: as a unit of sound? Or still as a number? And will an acronym such as LOL be recorded in our mental dictionary as a word, similar to WC or TV? Or will it remain an abbreviation representing three separate words?
Brain activity
Ganushchack is currently researching how words are formed and recognised by the brain. She works predominantly with EEG (Electroenceophalography) enabling her to measure brain activity. In her dissertation, on which she obtained her PhD in March, she dealt with what occurs in the brain when people make a language error. Ganushchak has won an NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) Rubicon subsidy for her new research on the neuro-linguistic aspects of texting and internet language
B33N
Ganushchack: 'Personally, I make use of these abbreviations and letter-number combinations not only when texting or when I use internet but also elsewhere, I have noticed. I discovered that very little research has been conducted on this subject and certainly not with EEG support. What happens when letters are changed into numbers has been examined. Take writing b33n for example instead of been. It appears that people still recognise it as a word. But we don't know any more about it.'
Dr Lesya Ganushchak: 'If you write b33n instead of bee it still appears to be recognised as a word. But we don't know any more about this.' | Birmingham
In August she will leave for Birmingham. The Department of Psycholinguistics is excellent there, she knows. 'They have good labs and good people. I will work predominantly with Professor Antje Meyer and Dr Andrea Krott. Antje Meyer conducts extensive research on such issues as the relation between visual word recognition and the planning of speech. These aspects are combined in texting language and so I had already talked my ideas over with her at a very early stage.'
TV and WC
In her EEG experiments, Ganushchak will compare two groups of test subjects: absolute beginners and jargon adepts. 'It will, of course, be related to people's ages.' She will subject them, for example, to masked priming: making a word flit very fast across the screen, so that the test subject does not realise he has actually seen it. Ganushchak: 'With this method I can see if the word 'laugh' is activated if the test candidate has subconsciously seen the acronym LOL. I will do the same to check this method with such established acronyms as TV and WC.
Nonsense combinations
Using another experiment Ganushchak wants to discover more about the processes underlying letter-number combinations in the brains. She will alternate frequently used combinations such as 4U with nonsense combinations and series of only numbers or letters. 'We know which parts of the brain are responsible for producing letters and which for numbers. But what in fact happens when a number is used as a lexical unit?'
Excluded by lottery
Lesya Ganushchak was born in Nikolaev, in the Ukraine, and was 17 when she moved to the Netherlands with her parents. 'I had already started my medical studies - everyone in my family is a doctor - but the school diplomas didn't match exactly so I went to an international secondary school in Maastricht for another two years. When I was excluded by lottery for medicine in the Netherlands, I started studying psychology in Maastricht.' This proved to be a happy choice. She specialised in neuro- inguistics and obtained her PhD within the Vici project of Professor Dr Niels Schiller. When he became a professor in Leiden, Ganushchak joined him. In March 2008 Ganushchak obtained her PhD based on her dissertation entitled 'The nature of the verbal monitor'.
Rubicon subsidies
The Rubicon subsidies offer newly qualified PhDs the opportunity to gain research experience abroad. This year, five Leiden researchers were granted an NWO Rubicon subsidy, enabling them to obtain research experience abroad after having obtained their PhD. Three of them are going to the USA, one to the United Kingdom and one to Australia. Two foreign researchers will come to Leiden. In total, 31 researchers were awarded a Rubicon grant.
Links
(1 July 2008/HP)
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