Teens in US sending more texts than ever: study

Text messaging has eclipsed the telephone call to become the most frequent form of communication among US teenagers, and girls send more than twice as many messages as boys, according to a new study.The study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the University of Michigan released Tuesday found that the average adolescent sends or receives 50 or more messages a day, or 1,500 texts per month.Thirty-one percent send and receive more than 100 messages per day or more than 3,000 messages a month and 15 percent send more than 200 texts a day.

Michael Dodge/Stringer/Getty Images It seems weird to think that, at some point in recent human history, you had to call your partner's work phone to talk to them during the day — and only if something was really important.

Michael Dodge/Stringer/Getty Images It seems weird to think that, at some point in recent human history, you had to call your partner's work phone to talk to them during the day — and only if something was really important.

City of AugsburgTexting in Augsburg, Germany just got a whole lot safer. Following a March accident in which a 15-year-old girl got hit by a train while looking at her phone, city officials decided recently to install traffic lights directly in the sidewalk.

More American adults are texting but they are not tapping out nearly as many messages per day on their cellphones as teenagers, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.The survey, conducted for the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project in May 2010, found that 72 percent of American adults aged 18 and older send and receive text messages, up from 65 percent in September 2009.

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Young Americans send almost ten times as many texts as Americans over 55. According to Experian, U.S. smartphone owners aged 18 to 24 send 2,022 texts per month on average — 67 texts on a daily basis — and receive another 1,831. That's nearly double their slightly older peers, smartphone users aged 25 to 34.

Market tracker Nielsen Co. on Thursday released a study confirming what many US parents already knew: teens love to use mobile phones to swap text messages."If it seems like American teens are texting all the time, it's probably because on average they're sending or receiving 3,339 texts a month," Nielsen said in a release accompanying a study based on monthly mobile phone bills."That's more than six per every hour they're awake."Nielsen analyzed data from more than 60,000 US mobile phone service subscribers in April, May, and June.