Texts to reveal who committed crimes?

Forensic experts are to study how text messages could be linked to crimes.

Psychologists at the University of Leicester are researching how individuals can be identified by their texting style in a bid to make better use of the data mobile phones contain.

Dr Tim Grant, one of the researchers, told silicon.com: "The smaller the text message the harder it is to find who said what. The police are able to tell where a phone is by triangulation but not who is holding it.

"We're trying to get the individual differences in texting styles. That's the basic idea - we know we can do this for longer texts."

The university argues that linguistic analysis can reveal secrets in criminal investigations, which may not be obvious.

Researchers are looking to recruit at least 100 volunteers to participate in an anonymous web study.

Guinea pigs will each be asked to contribute 10 anonymous text messages, which researchers will try to link to the contributer's user ID.

Grant added: "As texting is both a relatively new mode of communication and a particularly informal way of using language, there is not a strong expectation that texters will follow linguistic conventions. This freedom therefore allows for significant individual differences in text messaging style, and this can be used to identify the text's author."