Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Guff. And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about whether text speak harms your literacy skills, why the recipe for

Smores isn't as old as you think, and what lead does to the human body.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

These days a lot of us spend our time texting and tweeting and posting things online,

and that has some people starting to wonder is all that text speak hurting our

literacy skills if you are a parent should you be worried that your kids will be

putting emoticons in term papers instead of vocabulary words?

Let's look at some of the research into this.

Back in 2009, renowned psychology researcher Dr. Michelle Druin let a study on so-called text speak and literacy.

80 college students participated in the study and more than half of them were worried that using

text speak was hurting their ability to use and remember standard English.

But their fears were unfounded.

The study showed no significant differences in literacy scores or spelling ability between texers and non-texters.

The texters also showed that they recognized the difference between occasions where

text speak is appropriate, like in casual messages to friends, and when it's not, like in emails to their

professors.

Okay, but 2009 was a long time ago, at least in internet terms.

How about more recent research? Well in 2016

researchers from Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam

reviewed previous work on texting including Druin's paper and they conducted their own study of grammar and texting with Dutch 10 to 13 year olds.

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