Abstract
In January 2018, Joan Sereno and Michael Vitevitch stepped down as Editors of Language and Speech after five years of service. We are deeply appreciative of their excellent stewardship of the journal, as well as the stewardship of the previous editors, and are honored to take the reins of such a high-quality and well-regarded journal in our field. We are especially grateful that our predecessors introduced a short-report format for manuscript submissions and hope to see continued growth in short-report submissions in the coming years. We would also like to acknowledge that although we began handling new manuscript submissions in January 2018, the majority of the papers that appeared in the 2018 volume of Language and Speech were edited by Joan and Michael, and several additional papers from their editorship will appear in future issues of the journal. Michael and Joan also commissioned the special issue on Learning to Listen from Sounds to Words (Christine Shea, Guest Editor) that appeared as the last issue of the 2018 volume.
The comprehensive study of language and speech requires input from scholars across multiple disciplines. Therefore, we will continue to welcome submissions from researchers from all disciplines and perspectives that can advance our understanding of the production, perception, processing, learning, use, and disorders of speech and language. This commitment to diversity of thought continues the interdisciplinary mission that Language and Speech has followed since its inception. In line with this interdisciplinary nature, we look forward to continuing to receive submissions with many different theoretical approaches and empirical methodologies, both traditional and new.
In addition to encouraging both traditional and new perspectives on speech and language, with this editorial, we introduce a new format for manuscript submissions to Language and Speech: Registered Reports. The academic publishing landscape has been adapting slowly in recent years in response to growing questions and concerns about the standards of research (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011) and the reproducibility of research in our and related fields (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). There is also increasing awareness that work in experimental psychology and experimental linguistics tends to be underpowered (Dienes, 2008) and that there is a bias towards publishing positive results (de Bruin, Treccani, & Della Sala, 2015). We hope to contribute to efforts to address these issues in our editorial work. We plan to actively encourage more papers that make use of statistical techniques to formally and quantitatively assess statistical power and sample size, such as power analyses or Bayesian statistical methods. To further foster the reproducibility of research, we also join many other journals in now accepting Registered Reports as a new format for manuscript submission. In this format, authors submit a detailed plan for a study. This plan is reviewed through typical peer review processes and, if the research question, study motivation, and proposed methods are found to be interesting and appropriate, provisionally accepted. Then the study is conducted, with the commitment of the journal that the results will be published, irrespective of the outcome. The advantage of the Registered Report format is that researchers must commit to procedural details, analysis strategy, and sample size before running the study. We therefore expect that Registered Reports will be especially useful when there is a very clear a priori idea of the potential effect size, which in turn facilitates the a priori calculation of an adequate sample size. Language and Speech is now accepting Registered Report submissions and we explicitly welcome replication attempts to be submitted under this format. Detailed instructions for this format are available on the journal website and can be obtained by email from the editorial office. We are grateful to the Open Science Federation for facilitating our implementation of Registered Reports.
Nevertheless, we will not make pre-registration of study procedures mandatory for publication in Language and Speech. There are two reasons for maintaining the traditional publication route in our field, one theoretical and one practical. First, theoretically, Popper (1959) distinguished the context of discovery and the context of justification in scientific work. This distinction provides a motivation for allowing a “protected space” for devising new hypotheses or new ways of testing existing hypotheses. The study of speech and language, particularly understudied languages, necessarily involves some exploration and revision of hypotheses as part of the research process. Our continued acceptance of regular manuscript submissions will still allow for this kind of exploratory research to find a publication home in Language and Speech. Second, from a practical point of view, many studies submitted to Language and Speech consist of multiple experiments, in which the design of latter experiments is informed by the results of earlier ones. Requiring multiple rounds of review for every additional experiment through the Registered Reports format would potentially lead to extensive delays in the publication of new and important findings. We will hence continue to value submissions without prior registration.
Manuscript submissions to Language and Speech should still be made via the Sage Track ScholarOne portal (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/las). We are very pleased that James Polikoff is continuing his role as Managing Editor for the journal, lending his vast experience and institutional knowledge to our transition. We would also like to thank the recent outgoing Associate Editors, the Associate Editors who are continuing their service, and the new Associate Editors who have joined the editorial team in 2018. We cannot overstate the importance of the work of the Associate Editors in maintaining the high standards and outstanding reputation of Language and Speech and truly appreciate their service to the journal and the field.
