Could texting be good for kids after all?

Excessive texting can lead to a host of problems for kids-but illiteracy might not be one of them.

A year-long study by researchers at Coventry University in England has found that, rather than ruining their ability to speak, read, and write proper English, texting seemed to help teens recognize rhymes and speech patterns, leaving them with better literacy skills than kids who don't use cell phones.

Psychologist Dr Clare Wood, who led the study, said that all of those abbreviations-"C U l8r," "OMG," "TTFN," and the like-actually helped to develop kids' reading and writing skills and led them to subconsciously practice spelling.

"We began studying in this area initially to see if there was any evidence of association between text abbreviation use and literacy skills at all, after such a negative portrayal of the activity in the media," Wood said in a statement about the study. "We were surprised to learn that not only was the association strong, but that textism use was actually driving the development of phonological awareness and reading skill in children. Texting also appears to be a valuable form of contact with written English for many children, which enables them to practice reading and spelling on a daily basis."

In the United States, cell-phone users send more than 75 billion text messages per month, and according to a late-2008 Nielsen study of 50,000 US cell-phone users, kids age 13 to 17 were texting the most, with an average of 1,742 text messages per month, nearly 10 times as many texts as phone calls. Some kids have racked up staggering bills -- a 13-year-old girl in California sent and received more than 14,500 text messages in a single month in 2009, and a Florida father has boasted that his teen has hit more than 35,000 texts in a month not once, but twice. Texting has become the second-most popular thing to do with a cell phones. (The most-popular? Checking the time, not making a phone call.)

But does that mean that more texting leads kids to be less literate? Not necessarily.

All that time typing still counts as practice, after all. And each generation has it's own slang-witness the evolution of "hip" to "cool" to "hot" to "sick" to whatever it is now. What if the mangled shorthand kids use in texting is just another type of patois?

That's not to say that there aren't dangers associated with texting all the time. Sleep deprivation, information overload, cyber-bullying, and sexting are all serious issues that have become more prevalent in kids who have 24/7 access to cell phones. But illiteracy? The jury's still out on that one. Or, rather, "U hv 2 chk bck l8r."