Instant messaging, digital writing and spelling production quality in French.

The increased use of digital writing led to the appearance of written content that may differ from the standards of spelling. Writing instant messages leads to the production of two different types of written forms that differ from standard spelling: (a) those that can be confused with misspellings and (b) those that cannot. We showed that the production of the second type of modifications has no effect on spelling production. Our research protocol allowed comparing two corpora (written in 1974 and 2012). These results showed that when a modification has no orthographic equivalent, its use cannot damage the quality of spelling production. When it does, the effect on spelling may be negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]