30 April 2026
YouTube and Instagram may be reshaping the way teenagers read and write, scientists believe.
Now psychologists at the 17勛圖厙 will explore how shifting reading habits and increased screen time are affecting literacy as part of a major research project beginning next month (May 2026).
The five-year study, Literacy in the Digital Age: How Children Learn from Multimedia Written Language, will look at how young people's literacy develops – not only through exposure to traditional inputs such as books and school texts, but also through engagement with video, images and other digital content.
Led by Dr Yaling Hsiao from the Department of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, the £900,000 project addresses a critical gap in understanding adolescent literacy. Currently, close to 40% of 11-year-olds in England are failing to meet expected standards.
Dr Hsiao said: “Parents and teachers worry that teenagers spend too much time on their phones and not enough time reading books, but we don’t actually know what impact this may be having on their reading and writing.
“This project will examine how literacy develops through exposure to video, images and online media, as well as printed text, and will gather comprehensive data about the range of print and digital texts teenagers engage with.
“This will provide a more complete picture of how literacy is changing in the digital age, and how those changes are affecting young people today.”
As well as mapping the new literacy landscape, the study will examine how reading and writing interact and how individual differences in cognitive abilities, socioeconomic background and language experience influence learning.
Funding for the project, which runs through to 2031, comes from a Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award.
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