Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure your submission is ready for and fits the scope of the journal. Before submitting, please read over the Author Guidelines, the Statistics and Methods guidelines and the Statistics checklist, against which reviewers and action editors are asked to assess quantitative empirical papers. The most important points are as follows:

Language Development Research has two article types: Registered Reports and Regular Articles (anything from a single- or multiple-study empirical paper to a theoretical paper, literature review or meta-analysis). Neither article type has any word limit.
Data, code and materials availability statement. Sharing of data, analysis code and experimental materials is mandatory, unless authors have agreed an exemption with the journal at the point of submission. In order to proceed to peer review, submitted articles must include a “Data, code and materials availability statement” which includes links to permanent repositories (with Digital Object Identifiers [DOIs] wherever possible) and details of any exemptions agreed (for more details, see the Author Guidelines)
Initial submissions must be in PDF form but otherwise can follow any format. However, if you are submitting an already-accepted paper for uploading onto the journal's public website, it MUST be formatted according to the template found here. The journal does not employ typesetters or copyeditors: Our no-cost model relies entirely on authors undertaking these tasks for themselves.
You must upload a single PDF that includes the text of your article, any Figures and Tables (ideally positioned within the text), any Appendix, Supplementary Material etc. and - for revise-and-resubmit articles - a response to reviewers. This single PDF will be sent, unchanged, to the reviewers, with no processing at our end. If you wish to make any comments to the Action Editor that you do NOT want to be sent to the reviewers, please use the "Comments to the Editor" text box at the bottom of this page.
Authors are strongly encouraged to suggest both proposed and opposed reviewers, using the "Suggested and Opposed" reviewers box at the end of the submission process. The journal does not guarantee to invite proposed reviews, but guarantees not to invite opposed reviewers.
By default, authors are not anonymous to reviewers, since the journal encourages public posting and sharing of submitted preprints. However, if you wish to do so, you may remain anonymous to reviewers, in which case it is your own responsibility to remove any identifying information from the manuscript and any posted preprints, data archives etc. The journal does not employ editorial administration staff, and will perform no anonymization checks. Reviewers are anonymous to authors, unless they waive anonymity by clearly signing their review (we will not remove the names of reviewers who have signed their review).
The journal charges no fees for submission or publication. Authors shall agree to publish their article with Language Development Research ("the journal") under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International(CC BY-NC 4.0) license (summary: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/; full license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode). Although authors grant first digital publication rights to LDR, and agree to publish under the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, authors retain their copyright and full publishing rights.
By submitting a manuscript to Language Development Research, authors are agreeing to abide by the Author Agreement set out here, and by all Policies and Procedures set out in the full Policies and Procedures document here.

Once you have read these guidelines and are ready to proceed, please register an account (or login if you have an existing account)

About

Language Development Research: An Open-Science Journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of empirical and theoretical scholarship relevant to the study of language development. The field of language development (typical and atypical, mono-, bi- and multi-lingual) is broadly construed to include, for example, studies of second language learning (or artificial language learning) in older children or adults, studies of nonhuman animals, computational modeling studies, studies or theories of the adult endpoint, etc., provided that they are relevant to the issue of language development. We invite submissions that meet our criteria for rigour, without regard to the perceived novelty or importance of the findings. We publish general and special issues ("Special Collections") in a rolling format, to ensure rapid, cost-free publication for authors.

Submission Checklist

If you wish to do so, anonymize your manuscript (and any preprints and/or repositories elsewhere).
Ensure that your paper includes (a) a statement detailing all Ethics approvals and consent (if required), (b) an Authorship and contributorship statement that details the contributions made by each author or contributor (for multiple-authors papers) and (c) a Data, code and materials availability statement(for empircal papers).
Create a single PDF that includes the text of your article, any Figures and Tables (ideally positioned within the text), any Appendix, Supplementary Material etc. and - for revise-and-resubmit articles - a response to reviewers. This single PDF will be sent, unchanged, to the reviewers, with no processing at our end. If you are submitting an already-accepted paper for uploading onto the journal's public website, it must be formatted according to the template found here The journal does not employ typesetters or copyeditors: Our no-cost model relies entirely on authors undertaking these tasks for themselves.
No cover letter is neededfor initial submissions. If you are resubmitting your paper in response to a Revise-and-Resubmit decision, please (a) use the functionality provided by your word processing software to track and/or highlight changes in the single PDF that you resubmit and (b) include a response to reviewers as part of the same single PDF. NB: If the Action Editor decides to send the paper back to the reviewers (or, exceptionally, to new reviewers), these reviewers will see your response as part of the single PDF. If you wish to make any comments to the Action Editor that you do NOT want to be sent to the reviewers, please use the "Comments to the Editor" text box at the bottom of this page.
Recommend suggested/opposed reviewers, using the relevant text box. Please do help our Action Editors by nominating suggested reviewers: Nobody knows your particular sub-field better than you do, so your suggestions really help.

Copyright Notice

All Language Development Research articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International(CC BY-NC 4.0) license (summary: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/; full license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode).. Although authors grant first digital publication rights to LDR, and agree to publish under the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence, authors retain their copyright and full publishing rights.

Peer Review

The journal operates a single-anonymous review policy and an optional double-anonymous review policy. That is, reviewers are anonymous to authors, unless they waive anonymity by clearly signing their review (we will not remove the names of reviewers who have signed their review). By default, authors are not anonymous to reviewers, since the journal encourages public posting and sharing of submitted preprints, via both academic sites such as Psyarxiv and OSF, which allow for anonymization, and public-facing social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which do not. However, authors may opt for double-anonymous review, in which they are additionally anonymous to reviewers. In this case, it is the authors’ own responsibility to remove any identifying information from the manuscript and any posted preprints, data archives etc. The journal does not employ editorial administration staff, and will perform no anonymization checks.

Licences

The following licences are allowed:

CC BY-NC 4.0
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Publication Fees

All articles published by Language Development Research do not require Author Processing Charges or any other fees.

Publication Cycle

Language Development Research publishes continuously in a rolling format.

Sections

Section or article type	Public Submissions	Peer Reviewed	Indexed
LLMs Special Issue
Metaphor Comprehension Special Issue
Article
Registered Report