Caracteres: Estudios Culturales y Críticos de la Esfera Digital (May 2016)

Vocabulario de la informática y las nuevas tecnologías. Caracterización desde la disponibilidad léxica

  • Carmela Tomé Cornejo

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 1
pp. 112 – 139

Abstract

Read online

This article presents an approach to general vocabulary related to the fields of computing and emerging technologies from the perspective of lexical availability. For this purpose, we analyzed the responses given by two groups of participants: 45 undergraduate students, from 18 to 22 years old, and 30 elderly adults, from 65 to 72 years old. From a quantitative point of view, we find statistically significant differences between the number of words produced by the two groups of informants. This result is attributed to age differences and its relation to the modality of the test, but, mainly, these data are related to the level of familiarity with the topics proposed. From a qualitative point of view, although the compatibility between the two lists is quite low due to their different sizes, both groups recall, essentially, the same subcategories. In addition, both lists present a great number of abbreviations, anglicisms and brand names in very advanced positions. Unexpectedly, young adults and elderly adults wrote a similar number of foreign terms and brand names. Nevertheless, the latter are more likely to adapt those words borrowed from English.

Keywords