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

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 betw

"The current results showed that the use of text messaging increased with age, but confirmed the importance of text-messaging for all age groups, with even primary school children reporting that they preferred to text than ring friends, and spent longer on texting than many other everyday academic and leisure activities... Young adults, teenagers, and children all showed multiple examples of missing or unconventional punctuation, missing capitals, and errors in word-level grammar. Combined, these errors occurred at a ratio of about one for every two words for the two child groups, and one for every four words for the adults. For children, the most common error was to omit conventional punctuation (e.g., hi how are you), followed by omitting words (pronouns, verbs, and function words, e.g., you want come out?); for adults, these two types of violations were also the most common... We found that children, teenagers, and young adults all significantly reduced the proportion of grammatical errors they had made on all or nearly all of the four main textism categories. However, the corrections were not made uniformly, as some grammatical transgressions remained uncorrected, even for the adults, although the overall rate of errors was reduced by about half....children who found it harder to choose the correct grammar-based spelling for nonwords, and adults who found it harder to correct grammatical errors in others’ messages, were more likely to include grammatical violations in their own text messages. Although no causal conclusions can be drawn from this cross-sectional study, it could be that children and adults who violate conventional written grammar when writing text messages might have a poorer grasp of some grammar-based spelling rules than their peers. However, this negative relationship is not a general one, as it occurred for only one of the three tasks for two of the age groups. There was no significant relationship between grammatical task scores and naturalistic grammatical violations for the secondary school students." (Kemp et al, 2014: 1598-99).