Textisms in SMS and creativity of SMS’writers

Studies on SMS and teenagers have exploded the last few years. Results show that there is a link between textisms (change in a word’s orthographic form compared to traditional writing) and students’ literacy skills (Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 2011, 27 (1)). Only one study has investigated the link between cell phone use and creativity (Jackson et al., 2012). In the present study, the participants were 24 girls and boys (mean age 21 years, SD=1.44 years) enrolled into a psychology course at a French university. They were asked to write SMS on their phones (under real life scripts) and passed the EPoC battery (Evaluation of Potential of Creativity, Lubart et al., 2011). Our results focus on: (1) the density of textisms produced by the participants while writing SMS; (2) the level of divergent and integrative thinking (verbal and graphic domains) of the writers. We distinguished between two types of textisms: (a) consistent with the traditional written French code (lov for love) Vs. (b) breaking with the traditional code (gr8 for great) (Bernicot et al., 2012). The second ones are the most representative of SMS teenage language. Results show a negative and significant relationship between textisms breaking with the code and verbal creativity (r = -.53 and r = -.41, p<.05 for divergent and integrative thinking respectively). Moreover, students who produce less textisms breaking with the code have the greatest amount of verbal divergent thinking (t(22) = 2.13, p<.05) and graphical integrative thinking (t(22) = -2.47, p<.05). Results are interpreted in terms of declarative knowledge in long term memory.