Predictive texting can prove problematical for young people.

By letting their mobiles formulate words for them, many learn how to act fast, but with little or no concern for accuracy.

That is the finding of researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who analysed the cognitive capacities and mobile phone use of 317 children aged between 11 and 14.

As part of the research programme, the children were required to carry out a number of tasks, with their response times and performance accuracy being recorded.

Quoted on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website, Professor Michael Abramson of Monash said: “the kids who used their phones a lot were faster on some of the tests, but were also less accurate.”

"If you're used to operating in that environment and entering a couple of letters and getting the word you want, you expect to be like that," he added.

For believers in the “Three R’s”, the results will come as no surprise. Old style educationalists continue to constantly advocate the need for students to learn to both spell correctly and simultaneously acquire a proper command of grammar.

Abramson’s suggestion that predictive texting can prove detrimental to cognitive development will inevitably lead to further demands to ban the use of mobile phones on academic premises.

But this will be nothing new. Electronic calculators were once blamed for declining standards of numeracy. By permitting such devices to be used in classrooms, teachers stood accused of causing a nationwide decline in mental arithmetical competence.

Suffice to say, throughout history, technological developments have invariably been blamed for declining academic and social standards.

No doubt when Guttenberg invented the printing press, and with it the ability to disseminate ideas and information on paper, someone may well have suggested that people everywhere would soon stop bothering to use their memories.

More recently, television has stood accused of being less intellectually rigorous than reading, of destroying conversation and reducing us all to the status of coach potatoes.

But such extreme fears are seldom justified. In the same way that only a small minority of those drinking alcohol become alcoholics, few of the kids punching out an overabundance of text messages will turn out illiterate in later life.

Indeed, the converse could well prove true.

According to a report on the Channel 4 website, “we still send 16% of school leavers out into the ‘real world’ every year unable to read, write and spell adequately for the demands of daily life.”

If true, that is a terrifying statistic.

Consequently, the fact that schoolchildren are showing an interest in written communication, even if it is only texting, should be seen as an opportunity for educationalists.

Because, if nothing else, texting provides an introduction to the rudimentary skills required for reading and writing. And that, surely, should provide the platform on which a good teacher can build.

All they need do is to convince those children that the Readers Digest were correct in claiming: “It pays to improve your word power.”