Does Texting Affect Spelling and Grammar? The Study That Started the Panic Explained Under Five Per Cent of the Variance

If you search this question you will find, on the same results page, a university press release saying texting may lead to poor grammar and a research foundation saying the claim is a myth. Both are describing real studies. They are describing different ones.

Here is what each actually found.

The study behind the headline

Cingel and Sundar (2012), in New Media & Society, surveyed 228 students in grades six to eight in a mid-sized east-coast school district, asking them about their texting habits and giving them an offline, age-appropriate grammar assessment.

Their conclusion, verbatim from the abstract: “Results show broad support for a general negative relationship between the use of techspeak in text messages and scores on a grammar assessment.” They found word-level adaptations negatively related to grammar scores, while structural adaptations were not significant.

That sentence produced most of the coverage this topic has ever had. It is worth looking at what sits underneath it.

The linguist Mark Liberman, writing on Language Log in August 2012, worked through the paper’s own reported statistics. His findings, from the authors’ numbers:

• “Sent adaptation” accounted for about 4.7% of the variance in grammar scores - a figure he characterises as “pitifully small”.
• On the 22-item assessment, that is somewhat less than one question’s worth of variation.
• The analysis tested at least twenty independent variables, of which one reached significance.
• The survey response rate was 42.1% of 542 distributed.

He raises further problems: unmeasured confounds including socioeconomic status and peer group; the likelihood that participants could infer the study’s hypothesis from a survey they took home; the omission of prior research finding positive associations between textism use and literacy; and his view that the assessment’s questions “generally have very little to do with ‘grammar’ in the traditional sense.”

Liberman’s analysis is an expert commentary on an academic blog, not a peer-reviewed reply, and we are labelling it as such. But the numbers he is working from are the paper’s own, and the study’s design is a cross-sectional survey. Whatever it shows, it cannot show that texting caused anything.

What happened when someone followed children over a year

The obvious way to settle a direction-of-causation question is to measure children twice.

Wood and colleagues at Coventry University and the University of Tasmania, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, did exactly that: text messages and formal grammar and spelling tests, at baseline and at twelve-month follow-up, across primary school, secondary school and university samples.

The results run against the panic in a way that is difficult to explain away:

• No link, at either time point, between grammatical violations in children’s texts and reduced understanding of standard grammar.
• Primary school children’s use of ungrammatical word forms at baseline predicted better spelling ability twelve months later.
• Secondary students’ ungrammatical forms, missing punctuation and omitted capitalisation showed positive associations with spelling growth.
• Young adults showed weak negative relationships between textism use and grammatical understanding - which were explained by general ability differences.

A companion concurrent study, Wood, Kemp, Waldron and Hart (2014), tested 243 people across three age bands - 89 primary pupils (mean 9.9 years), 84 secondary pupils (mean 12.8), 70 undergraduates (mean 20.8) - using standardised measures of spoken grammar comprehension (TROG-II), written grammatical understanding, orthographic processing, IQ and spelling, against coded text messages.

Their finding for children: “there does not appear to be any sign of a significant negative relationship between grammatical errors made when texting and primary school children’s understanding of standard grammar or knowledge of conventional spelling.”

And their overall statement: “Overall, there is little evidence that ungrammatical texting behaviour is linked to grammatical understanding or knowledge of orthographic representations of language in children.”

There is one real negative finding in this work, and it is worth reporting because it is the exception. Among undergraduates, the tendency to make punctuation and capitalisation errors in texts accounted for a further 8.0% of the variance in a written orthographic choice task, and the relationship held after controlling for IQ and spelling ability.

So the pattern is close to the opposite of the folk theory. In children, texting behaviour is neutral or mildly positive for literacy. In adults, whose literacy is already consolidated, one narrow negative association shows up - in punctuation, not spelling.

The Dutch study that found the same reversal

van Dijk, van Witteloostuijn, Vasić, Avrutin and Blom (2016), in PLOS ONE, tested 55 Dutch primary school children aged 10 to 13 on receptive vocabulary, grammar via sentence repetition, and executive function tasks, alongside their elicited and spontaneous text messages.

Word omission in text messages significantly predicted better grammar performance. Textism use showed only marginal correlations with language measures, which lost significance in regression. Executive function showed no meaningful relationship with texting at all.

Fifty-five children is a small sample, and the study was funded by a university seed grant with no competing interests declared. But it is a third independent group finding a positive or null relationship where the popular claim predicts a negative one.

Why the reversal might be real

There is a mechanism proposed for this and it is not far-fetched. Most common text abbreviations are phonetically driven - they require the writer to break a word into sounds and represent them with letters, which is the same operation phonological awareness training asks of beginning readers. On that account, texting is not sloppy writing; it is unsupervised phonological practice.

We are flagging that as a proposed explanation rather than a demonstrated one. The longitudinal association is measured; the mechanism behind it is an interpretation.

What to make of it

The honest summary is short. There is no good evidence that text messaging damages children’s spelling or grammar. The best-designed study - a year-long longitudinal design with two measurement points across three age groups - found the association running the other way for the youngest children. The study that produced the alarming headline was a one-off survey in which the key variable explained under five per cent of the variance, in an analysis testing twenty variables.

The one qualification worth carrying: among adults, punctuation habits in texts do track written punctuation performance, by a small amount, independent of general ability.

This is a claim about spelling and grammar specifically. Whether reading on a screen changes comprehension is a different measurement with a different result, and whether hyperlinks impose a cost while reading is another one again.

Limitations and disputes

• The strongest critique of Cingel and Sundar is not peer-reviewed. It is a detailed analysis by a named linguist on an academic blog, working from figures reported in the paper. We have labelled it accordingly and have not treated it as equivalent to a published reply.
• All of this evidence is correlational or longitudinal-correlational. Nobody has randomly assigned children to text or not to text, and nobody plausibly could.
• The samples are small. 55 Dutch children; 243 across three UK/Australian age bands; 228 US students.
• The longitudinal study’s journal record was read via the funder’s account of it; we could not retrieve the paper itself, and no volume or page numbers are printed here for it.
• Wood, Kemp, Waldron and Hart (2014) was read from an institutional repository copy that did not carry the journal’s volume and page numbers; those are omitted rather than guessed.
• The phonological-practice explanation is an interpretation, not a finding of these studies.
• This says nothing about whether texting affects anything else - attention, sleep, social skill. Only spelling and grammar.