Phonewriting: the impact of word suggestions on orthographic processing
Résumé
The popularization of smartphones has revolutionized communication. People nowadays communicate primarily through their phones. They dedicate significant portions of their time to this form of writing rather than traditional methods like handwriting or typing on a desktop keyboard. Writing on a smartphone implies a new way of processing orthographic information due to the implementation of word suggestion systems. Spelling retrieval is no longer a mere recall of information on the letter components of a word. While writing the first letters, smartphones suggest words on top of the virtual keyboard to complete the target word before we write the last letters. This back-and-forth mechanism of writing letters, reading word suggestions, and selecting one of them, modifies the way we process orthographic information during word writing. In the present study, we focused on how word suggestions modulate word writing in phones. A spelling to-dictation task was administered to a group of 55 native monolingual French speakers (18–30 years old). The participants wrote French words in two conditions: with or without word suggestions on the top of the virtual keyboard. We manipulated also orthographic consistency (consistent vs inconsistent) and word length (5, 6, 7, 8 letters). The results revealed that word suggestions were used more often to write inconsistent long words. Furthermore, the participants rarely use word suggestions to write short words. For the latter, it seems as though the cognitive load to read and select the word suggestions is higher than the benefits. In addition, we found that the presence of suggestions decreases the number of errors only for inconsistentwords, especially when they are long. Using word suggestions also decreases the number of online corrections in long words. The use of word suggestions didn’t increase the total writing duration. Further analyses on online measures will better clarify the dynamics of orthographic processing in phonewriting with and without suggestions.