What is Text Messages

This article starts with an overview of the existing literature on mobile communication and then presents a more detailed account of the current scientific knowledge in mobile communication and deaf studies, followed by a summary of the findings from the two case studies that the author recently conducted. The first study investigated how texting was used by deaf adolescents in Japan. The second study examined text messages written by U.S. deaf adolescents. Both studies collected a small corpus of dyadic messages exchanged via cell phone between two deaf high-school students at each residential school to examine the unconventional spellings typically used in text messages, or “textisms.” The characteristics of each text-message corpus (356 messages produced by the Japanese pair, and 370 messages by the U.S. pair) were analyzed in order to explore the features of textisms adopted by these deaf adolescents.