University of Tasmania psychologist Dr Nenagh Kemp and honours student Catherine Bushnell conducted a study of about 90 children aged 10 to 12 from three middle-class primary schools. The researchers looked at whether taking such linguistic shortcuts was affecting the students' literacy skills. The results, recently published in the US Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, were surprising. They showed the use of textisms is driving the development of literacy skills and could be improving language and literacy learning. ''These findings provide important evidence against popular media claims that the use of textese is harming children's traditional literacy skills,'' Dr Kemp says. ''I feel uncomfortable saying that because I don't think it should be true but I keep finding that and so do other people … but I wouldn't use it as a reason for making your child text a lot. ''I think the important thing is for children to be able to see the difference between it being OK to write in this funny way on a phone but you can't write a formal letter like this or your school work.''

She was surprised to find 86 per cent of children aged between 10 and 12 had mobile phones, and all sent text messages. When asked how many they sent and received a day, the children's estimates ranged from less than one to 315. ''Even sending 200 messages a day would mean an average of one message every five minutes every available waking hour, which seems excessive,'' Dr Kemp says. Eighty per cent of children claimed to send and receive 100 short messages a day. Her findings support recent British research that found a strong link between primary school children's use of text abbreviations and improved literacy: textese was actually boosting the children's writing and reading skills.

Children who are good at quickly creating and interpreting textisms are also proficient at spelling and reading familiar and novel words. ''This fits with previous findings and supports the idea that the same skill set underlies the ability to manipulate the sounds and features of spoken, written and texted language. The ability to create or decipher phonetic abbreviations requires an awareness of the multiple sound-letter correspondences in English,'' Dr Kemp says. ''Further, increased experience with reading and writing textese might lead to increased confidence and flexibility with manipulating language sounds, a key skill for developing reading prowess.'' Dr Kemp believes the popularity of texting shows that language is fluid and flourishing - particularly when children play creatively with words rather than stick to standard usage. ''I started off thinking texting will be ruining their spelling but in fact it seems to do the opposite because children who are good at spelling, reading and language are also good at messing around with texting; they are better at guessing what a funny little acronym might be or better at making up a new one. ''It makes sense that someone who is good at language is also good at crosswords, poetry and so on … it's another way to play with the words of language.'' While this may not go down well with traditionalists, such findings have found an unlikely supporter in Britain's poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who believes texting is an ideal springboard to good poetry writing.

Ms Duffy believes the fun and creativity of mobile texting will turn today's children into the poets of tomorrow. ''The poem is a form of texting … it's the original text,'' Ms Duffy told The Guardian. In her study, Dr Kemp recorded 29 different text shortcuts for the word ''tomorrow''. Such examples show that more sophisticated literacy skills are needed to use textisms. Moreover, the proportion of abbreviations used in messages increased with age, from 21 per cent in grade 4 to nearly 50 per cent in grade 6. Surprisingly, though, when the children were asked to compose a message to a friend using textisms, they were generally no faster than writing in conventional English. In an earlier study with 61 undergraduates at the Tasmanian university who were all regular texters, Dr Kemp found the young adults were significantly faster at writing but slower at reading messages written in textese than in conventional English.

Like the children, the adults also made significantly more reading errors with messages written in textese.