Language Development Research: An Open-Science Journal

Submit via the "Submission" link above right. Please consult the author guidelines (PDF), and ensure your article includes a standalone Data, Code and Materials Availability Statement.

Science is for everyone. We set up Language Development Research (ISSN 2771-7976) because we don't believe in locking articles behind paywalls, in charging taxpayers and universities to publish research they've already funded, or in privileging papers that are "exciting" over those committed to scientific rigour. We believe that open science is better science. We uphold the highest standards of research integrity. We insist on open data and materials, and commit to publishing every article that is judged by our peer review process to meet our criteria for methodological and theoretical rigour.

We invite submissions of empirical and theoretical investigations of children's language development: typical and atypical, mono-, bi- and multi-lingual, spoken, signed, or written. We are also interested in the exploration of any topic or population relevant to language development, broadly construed (e.g., second language learning, artificial language learning, adult psycholinguistics, computational modeling).

Fiercely independent, we are answerable to no one except the scientific community and our 30-member strong Editorial Board of respected researchers. Please browse our articles (below on this page), learn more about the journal and its editorial policies, and, when you're ready, submit your article.

Featured Articles

David Pagmar, Kirsten Abbot-Smith, Danielle Matthews

Predictors of children's conversational contingency

Evelina Leivada, Elliot Murphy

A demonstration of the uncomputability of parametric models of language acquisition and a biologically plausible alternative

alejandrina cristia, Marisa Casillas

Non-word repetition in children learning Yélî Dnye

Linda Kelly, Elizabeth Nixon, Jean Quigley

It’s Your Turn: The Dynamics of Conversational Turn-Taking in Father-Child and Mother-Child Interaction

Khazar Khorrami, Okko Räsänen

Can phones, syllables, and words emerge as side-products of cross-situational audiovisual learning? - A computational investigation

Karla K McGregor, Ronald Pomper, Nichole Eden, Timothy Arbisi-Kelm, Nancy Ohlmann, Shivani Gajre, Erin Smolak

Children’s language abilities predict success in remote communication contexts

Disa Witkowska, Laura Lucas, Maria Jelen, Hannah Kin, Courtenay Norbury

Development of complex syntax in the narratives of children with English as an Additional Language and their monolingual peers

Giulia Bovolenta, Emma Marsden

Expectation violation enhances the development of new abstract syntactic representations: evidence from an artificial language learning study

Nicola Dawson, Yaling Hsiao, Alvin Wei Ming Tan, Nilanjana Banerji, Kate Nation

Features of lexical richness in children's books: Comparisons with child-directed speech

Ben Ambridge

Language Development Research Editorial: Why do we need another journal?

Mitja Nikolaus, Eliot Maes, Jeremy Auguste, Laurent Prévot, Abdellah Fourtassi

Large-scale study of speech acts' development in early childhood

Audun Rosslund, Julien Mayor, Gabriella Óturai, Natalia Kartushina

Parents’ hyper-pitch and low vowel category variability in infant-directed speech are associated with 18-month-old toddlers’ expressive vocabulary

Samuel David Jones, Madeline Dooley, Ben Ambridge

Passive sentence reversal errors in autism: Replicating Ambridge, Bidgood, and Thomas (2020)

Victoria Knowland, Mohreet Rauni, Gareth Gaskell, Sarah Walker, Elaine van Rijn, Courtenay Norbury, Lisa-Marie Henderson

Sleep behaviour in children with developmental language disorder

Benjamin Edward deMayo, Danielle Kellier, Mika Braginsky, Christina Bergmann, Cielke Hendriks, Caroline Frances Rowland, Michael C Frank, Virginia Marchman

Web-CDI: A system for online administration of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories

Maxime Alexandra Tulling, Ailís Cournane

Wishes before ifs: mapping “fake” past tense to counterfactuality in wishes and conditionals

Natalia Kartushina, Nivedita Mani, Aslı Aktan-Erciyes, Khadeejah Alaslani, Naomi J. Aldrich, Alaa Almohammadi, Haifa Alroqi, Lucy M. Anderson, Elena Andonova, Suzanne Aussems, Mireille Babineau, Mihaela Barokova, Christina Bergmann, Cara Cashon, Stephanie Custode, Alex de Carvalho, Nevena Dimitrova, Agnieszka Dynak, Rola Farah, Christopher Fennell, Anne-Caroline Fiévet, Michael C Frank, Margarita Gavrilova, Hila Gendler-Shalev, Shannon P. Gibson, Katherine Golway, Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez, Ewa Haman, Erin Hannon, Naomi Havron, Jessica Hay, Cielke Hendriks, Tzipi Horowitz-kraus, Marina Kalashnikova, Junko Kanero, Christina Keller, Grzegorz Krajewski, Catherine Laing, Rebecca A. Lundwall, Magdalena Łuniewska, Karolina Mieszkowska, Luis Muñoz, Karli Nave, Nonah Olesen, Lynn Perry, Caroline Frances Rowland, Daniela Santos Oliveira, Jeanne Shinskey, Aleksander Veraksa, Kolbie Vincent, Michal Zivan, Julien Mayor

COVID-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition: associations between caregiver-child activities and vocabulary gains

Iris Broedelet, Paul Boersma, Judith Rispens

Distributional learning of novel visual object categories in children with and without developmental language disorder