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Abstract: The article examines students’ evaluative responses to individual internet slang units and aims to identify the features of their internal organization within a concrete student audience. Although internet slang has been extensively described in contemporary linguistics as a dynamic and socially sensitive layer of vocabulary, the internal organization of evaluations elicited by some of its units has received much less attention. This study interprets evaluation as a psychologically treated response to a linguistic stimulus, that can be empirically recorded, compared, and subsequently described in structural terms. The empirical base of the study encompasses questionnaire data collected from 377 university students aged 17 to 21 in Central China. The stimulus material included ten units selected on an operational basis from the list “Top 10 Popular Chinese Online Expressions of 2024”. Evaluations were listed using a five-point Likert scale. Data processing included descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, and emotional modality analysis. The results show that evaluations of internet slang units differ both in their overall orientation and in their degree of consistency, forming an internally differentiated structure described by two components. The first component brings together predominantly expressive colloquial units associated with informal online communication, whereas the second includes comparatively less expressive units tending toward public, media, and normatively organized usage. The analysis of emotional modality has revealed the prevalence of positive responses, while neutral and negative evaluations are also present. The findings make it possible to regard such evaluations as analytically significant material for describing differences in the perception of internet slang units among university students and may be used in further psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic studies of digital communication. The study shows that internet slang units can be considered not only as an object of lexicological and sociolinguistic description, but also as material for psycholinguistically oriented exploration of responses to them.

About the author(s) :

Jing Bailiang

Henan Normal University (Xinxiang, People’s Republic of China)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1926-0975

Elena V. Kharchenko

South Ural State University (Chelyabinsk, Russian Federation)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0071-595X

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 21.09.2025; date of publication: 30.06.2026

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