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Updated: Oct 20, 2025

An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
Published on: October 25, 2019
Interlocutors' Age Impacts Teenagers' Online Writing Style: Accommodation in Intra- and Intergenerational Online
Lisa Hilte1, Walter Daelemans1, Reinhild Vandekerckhove1
1Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
Abstract:
The present study examines how teenagers adapt their language use to that of their conversation partner (i.e., the linguistic phenomenon of accommodation) in interactions with peers (intragenerational communication) and with older interlocutors (intergenerational communication). We analyze a large corpus of Flemish teenagers' conversations on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which appear to be highly peer-oriented. With Poisson models, we examine whether the teenage participants adjust their writing style to older interlocutors. The same trend emerges for three sets of prototypical markers of the informal online genre: teenagers insert significantly fewer of these markers when interacting with older interlocutors, thus matching their interlocutors' style and increasing linguistic similarity. Finally, the analyses reveal subtle differences in accommodation patterns for the distinct linguistic variables with respect to the impact of the teenagers' sociodemographic profiles and their interlocutors' age.
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