Auditory contact during an oral conversation may generally provide information of two kinds:
- voice of the speaker (which, again, doubles certain information already presented visually: sex, age (e.g. child’s voice and adult’s voice), health condition (e.g. voice affected by sore throat, etc.), pitch, intonation, emphases, accent);
- information about the environment, in which the conversation is taking place.
The second of the aforementioned points is self-evident and does not call for more details; therefore it seems more appropriate to concentrate on the first one, i.e. the voice of the speaker and its role in oral conversation. The sources of variability in speech (i.e. the features that make utterances pronounced by each individual unique and in that manner provide information about the speaker) may be classified as follows:
- dialects and accents (native vs. non-native speaker; region; sometimes also social position);
- male/female/children differences arising from: physical causes (length of the vocal tract; also, male and female larynxes mature in different ways — “breaking”); socially determined differences in the ways men and women speak;
- individual differences between speakers of the same dialect and sex — physical (body size, health condition) or deliberate/acquired;
- intonation, emphases, other ways of expressing emotions through voice.
Just like visual perception discussed above auditory perception is also missing in e-chat and may be substituted by means of various graphical devices: emoticons (partly for intonation), capital letters vs. small letters (phrases written all in capital letters may stand for shouting), font sizes (for emphasis), other graphic devices (several exclamation marks at a time, bold letters, spelling (e.g. “yaaaaaawn”), text positioning for stress: typing one word per line usually creates suspense (through pauses) and helps to stress each word).
Spelling varieties in e-chatting are also of interest (the style of spelling is in most cases determined by deliberate choice) — regular spelling or transliteration; for example, in Latvian the word “neighbor” may be written in at least four different ways: “kaimiņš” (regular spelling), “kaimins” (without diacritical symbols), “kaiminjsh” (with substitutes for diacritical symbols), “kaiminjsj” (with another system of substitutes for diacritical symbols). In Russian the word “clock” may be written at least in five ways: “часы”, “4asi”, “4asy”, “chasi”, “chasy”. It is not uncommon to use the letter “x” for “ks” letter combinations in Latvian (laiks -> laix, tvaiks -> tvaix (the latter has been seen even on LTV1 channel)), and “z” for final “s” (e.g. krizdabz); young people sometimes use “w” for “v” in Latvian (e.g. vakars -> “wakars” or even, in an extreme case, “wakarz”). It is common to use shortened forms of words in e-chatting conversations, for example, “vnk” for “vienkārši” (“just”), “tb” (in Latvian) for “i.e.”, “btw” for “by the way”, “imho” for “in my humble opinion”, etc.
As with means of visual expression the substitutes for auditory perception mentioned in this section are used deliberately during computer-mediated conversations and not always deliberately during face-to-face conversations (emotions, tone, emphasis).