You Said What?!: Misunderstandings in IM Conversation Among College Students
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2007
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
Instant messaging (IM) is an activity that is quite common among college students and
allows students to engage in simultaneous one-to-conversations with several people.
Instant messages lack paralinguistic cues such as facial expressions, intonation, and body
language, often leading to IM users to misinterpret statements made in instant message
conversations. The purpose of my paper is to analyze how misunderstandings occur and
are repaired in IM conversations among college students. Data was collected using
students’ saved logs of instant message conversations that had taken place using AOL
Instant Messenger or similar chat clients that shared the AOL chat protocol. IM
messages logs were analyzed for examples where misunderstandings occurred and were
repaired. I concluded that the majority of IM misunderstandings are due to problems
with word referencing or with users interpreting single words or phrases differently.
Additionally, lack of paralinguistic cues plays a role in the development of
misunderstandings in IM conversation. Future experimentation would include a larger
corpus of data and a survey of how people resolve misunderstandings using instant
messages versus in spoken conversation.