AUTHOR=Ganushchak Lesya , Krott Andrea , Meyer Antje S.

TITLE=From gr8 to great: Lexical Access to SMS Shortcuts

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=3

YEAR=2012

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00150

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00150

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>Many contemporary texts include shortcuts, such as <italic>cu</italic> or <italic>phones4u</italic>. The aim of this study was to investigate how the meanings of shortcuts are retrieved. A primed lexical decision paradigm was used with shortcuts and the corresponding words as primes. The target word was associatively related to the meaning of the whole prime (<italic>cu/see you</italic> – <italic>goodbye</italic>), to a component of the prime (<italic>cu/see you</italic> – <italic>look</italic>), or unrelated to the prime. In Experiment 1, primes were presented for 57 ms. For both word and shortcut primes, responses were faster to targets preceded by whole-related than by unrelated primes. No priming from component-related primes was found. In Experiment 2, the prime duration was 1000 ms. The priming effect seen in Experiment 1 was replicated. Additionally, there was priming from component-related word primes, but not from component-related shortcut primes. These results indicate that the meanings of shortcuts can be retrieved without translating them first into corresponding words.</p>