Hi Andrea, It seems to me that many who look at online sociality operate on the assumption that CMC is a kind of hybrid of writing and speech. In the work I'm doing on "netiquette," I find that users themselves tend toward this attitude as well, though with very interesting inconsistencies. In terms of *early* scholars who addressed the writing/speech overlap from a linguistic perspective, you might look at the three articles below by Collot and Belmore, Ferrara et al, and Denise Murray. Ferrara et al. argue that synchronous chat, what they call "Interactive Written Discourse," is a hybrid of speech and writing. Collot and Belmore say the same about asynchronous Bulletin board postings, which they call "Electronic language." Dieter Stein has also done some work using on turn-taking in chat that may help you (no reference handy at this computer, sorry!) That said, these are all linguistic approaches to the writing/speech question. Those dealing with questions of genre will approach the writing/speech question from another angle. Collot, Milena and Nancy Belmore. "Electronic Language: A New Variety of English." International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora. Ed. Jan Aarts, Pieter de Haan and Nelleke Oostdijk. Nijmegen: Rodopi, 1992. 41-55. Ferrara, K., H. Brunner, and G. Whittemore. "Interactive Written Discourse as an Emergent Register." Written Communication 8.1 (1991): 8-34. Murray, D.E. "The Composing Process for Computer Conversation." Written Communication 8.1 (1991): 35-55. Hope this helps, Elizabeth Maurer -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.2.5/284 - Release Date: 3/17/2006