ABSTRACT
So far we have seen that there has been a good deal of concern expressed about the potentially negative impact of text messaging on children’s literacy development. However, these arguments have been made – and largely accepted – without recourse to empirical work which has the potential to shed light on these issues. This chapter therefore begins with a summary of experimental work, which has been concerned with the more general issue of whether exposure to misspelled words can impact negatively on adults’ and children’s literacy performance. This is followed by a review of studies which have more specifically examined whether there is any evidence of a negative association between the ability to perform well on standardised tasks of conventional literacy outcomes, and the nature and extent of text messaging behaviours.
