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do i know its wrong: children’s and adults’ use of unconventional grammar in text messaging

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 01:39 authored by Nenagh KempNenagh Kemp, Wood, C, Waldron, S
There is concern that the violations of conventional grammar (both accidental and deliberate) often seen in text messages (e.g., hi ☺ how is ya?!!) could lead to difficulty in learning or remembering formal grammatical conventions. We examined whether the grammatical violations made by 244 British children, adolescents and young adults in their text messages was related to poorer performance on tasks of grammatical knowledge, including translating grammatically unconventional text messages into standard English. We found that variance in the production of grammatical violations in naturalistic messages was inconsistently predicted by grammatical task performance. Specifically, primary school children who made poorer grammar-based spelling choices were more likely to make more grammatical violations in their everyday messages, and university students who failed to correct more grammatical errors in a given set of messages were also more likely to make such errors in their own messages. There were no significant relationships for secondary school students. We conclude that using unconventional grammar when texting is not a consistent sign of poor grammatical abilities, although there may be links between some aspects of grammatical skill and grammatical violations in text messages.

History

Publication title

Reading and Writing

Volume

27

Issue

9

Pagination

1585-1602

ISSN

1573-0905

Department/School

School of Psychological Sciences

Publisher

Springer Netherlands

Place of publication

Netherlands

Rights statement

Copyright 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in psychology

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