Cell phones make kids faster, dumber

ronbutters at AOL.COM ronbutters at AOL.COM
Wed Aug 12 15:24:25 UTC 2009


So Doug knows a young woman who is a bad speller and that is evidence that spelling ability has recently declined among the young AND that textmessaging is almost certainly the cause?

Has this person learned ANYTHING from this listserv?

Does his assertion make any more sense than speculating that the new morality has "most certainly" caused an increase in adolescent masturbation--which in turn has "accentuated" putative literacy problems, given that everybody knows that wanking causes vision difficulties?
------Original Message------
From: Doug Harris
Sender: ADS-L
To: ADS-L
ReplyTo: cats22 at stny.rr.com
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Cell phones make kids faster, dumber
Sent: Aug 12, 2009 10:57 AM

Can't access your web page, Dennis, but I'm wondering...
did it _really_ take a "team" of any sort to verify that (texting
is 'counter intelligence')?
Not that spelling in the younger generation(s) wasnt' bad
enough already, texting has most certainly accentuated
that problem, too.
A young woman I know, 24 this month, a grad school education
student (and with a year of high school teaching under belt,
not only spells horribly, she seems not in the least concerned
about how inaccurate she is.
Watt, im wondrng, is the wurld comming too?
dh

Prepared and sent with Chaos Software's Intellect mail client.
Intellect's contacts and appointments managers also are cool.

----- Original message ----------------------------------------
From: "Dennis Baron" <debaron at ILLINOIS.EDU>
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Received: 8/12/2009 10:34:45 AM
Subject: Cell phones make kids faster, dumber


>There's a new post on the Web of Language:  Cell phones make kids
>faster, dumber

>Last year the Librarian of Congress warned that texting was
>responsible for a drastic decline in American sentences, but that
>opinion wasn't backed up by any scientific evidence. Now, a team of
>Australian psychologists has come a step closer to proving that mobile
>phones are destroying our ability to think. The researchers show that
>children who use mobile phones respond to higher-level cognitive tasks
>faster, but less accurately, than those who don't.

>Read the rest of the post on the Web of Language:
>http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage


>You can now subscribe to Web of Language posts -- just click the
>"subscribe" link on the website.


>____________________
>Dennis Baron
>Professor of English and Linguistics
>Department of English
>University of Illinois
>608 S. Wright St.
>Urbana, IL 61801

>office: 217-244-0568
>fax: 217-333-4321

>http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

>read the Web of Language:
>http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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