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Registered Reports: Guidelines for authors and reviewers | Special Issues: Guidelines for Guest Editors

Aims and scope

Language & Cognition: An interdisciplinary journal of language and cognitive science

Language and Cognition is an open access venue for the publication of high-quality empirical research focusing on the interface between language and cognition. It is open to research from the full range of subject disciplines, theoretical backgrounds, and analytical frameworks that populate linguistics and the cognitive sciences. We aim to cover a wide range of interdisciplinary research focused on presenting novel empirical data that addresses theoretical issues surrounding the language system.

We specialise in empirical work that is quantitative in nature, especially work that uses experimental or corpus methods.

In addition to the traditional areas of cognitive linguistics (e.g., construction grammar, metaphor theory, linguistic relativity, sensorimotor simulation), we especially welcome research which considers theoretical linguistic questions within a broader cognitive context. We also strongly encourage submissions investigating iconicity, multimodality, signed languages, gesture, or language evolution. We generally do not consider applied work, such as classroom based research, or studies focused on education, language aptitude or language teaching.

Language and Cognition is the official journal of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association.

Manuscript types

The journal has two primary article categories: Original Research Articles and Registered Reports.

Language and Cognition generally does not publish exclusively theoretical papers, review/overview papers, technical reports, commentary articles, or position papers.

If you have an idea for a special issue, please review the journal's guidelines on special issues before contacting the Editor-in-Chief with your proposal (email: [email protected]).

Registered Reports

To submit Registered Reports, please consult the journal guidelines here.

Original Articles

Original research articles make novel empirical contributions, using experimental, corpus-based, or computational methods.

Word Limit: Submitted articles should be no longer than 10,000 words, including references, footnotes and appendices. Published papers may in some circumstances exceed 10,000 words if they have grown in response to reviewer recommendations, but initial submissions should not exceed this limit, or otherwise they may be returned without review.

We also encourage the submission of replication studies and quantitative meta-analyses as original research articles.
Null results will be considered if these are based on rigorous methodology and sufficiently large sample sizes.
Given our focus on theoretical issues, we discourage submissions that are exclusively focused on applied linguistics / TESOL.
Given our focus on empirical issues, we similarly discourage submissions that are exclusively review/overview, or exclusively theoretical in nature. In some special cases, theoretical/review papers may be considered if agreement with the editorial team has been sought in advance.

Book reviews

Language and Cognition no longer accepts Book Reviews.

Peer review and anonymization

The journal operates on a double-anonymous peer review policy: authorship of submitted papers must be anonymized. Citations to work conducted by the author(s) need not be anonymized but should be talked about in third person to preserve anonymity. Please ensure that all materials in online repositories are anonymized (i.e., use anonymized view-only links on OSF and make sure that scripts contain no author-identifying information). In line with a double-anonymous peer review process, reviewers are anonymous as well but may optionally choose to sign their review if they wish to do so.

The review process usually takes around 3 months. Submissions are usually sent to at least 2 reviewers.

Open data and materials policy

Detailed information about Language and Cognition's open data and materials policy can be found on the journal's 'Research transparency' page.

Preparation of manuscripts

Formatting

File types: Manuscript files should be supplied as a Word or PDF document. Papers formatted in LaTeX should use the style/class files available below:
L&C LaTex Classfiles
Important: After acceptance, files should be provided as editable Word documents or LaTex files.

Title page: Each manuscript should have a title page with title and abstract, but no author names or any other author-identifying information.
Important: After acceptance, the authors need to provide a title page with their names and affiliations.

Abstract: Abstracts should not exceed 200 words.

Running header: Documents should have a running header of no more than 40 characters.

Formatting: The entire text should be double spaced, with ample margins, and the pages, as well as lines, should be numbered. For reviewing purposes, authors are recommended to leave figures/tables and captions in situ in the submission. However, once accepted, figures/tables must adhere to the instructions below.

Keywords: Please supply 3–10 keywords following the abstract.

Sections: Articles should be clearly divided into appropriately labeled and numbered sections. These sections are often, but not necessarily, Introduction, Methods, Statistical Analysis, Results, and Discussion. Where relevant, subheadings should be used within these sections, e.g. Participants, Procedure.

Referencing system

Language and Cognition follows the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition, 2019), except for that we use numbered sections (see above).

The link below gives detailed instructions:
https://apastyle.apa.org/instructional-aids/tutorials-webinars

General stylistic guidelines

You may use either British English or American English throughout your paper, but spelling should be consistent.

Standard linguistic abbreviations are in large capitals in the main body of the text, e.g., AUX, NP, but should be given in small capitals in the examples, and should follow the Leipzig MPI conventions (http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php).

Footnotes

Footnotes should be avoided at all costs and included only if absolutely necessary. Information that is relevant to the article should generally be included in the body of the text, eliminating the need for footnotes.

Clarity of writing

The Managing Editor or General Editors may return manuscripts that do not meet sufficient standards of clarity of writing. Manuscripts must be free of error and appropriate and clear in style upon final submission after acceptance.

More information about Cambridge's English language editing services are included below.

Statistics and statistical reporting

Statistical analyses need to be described in enough detail to reproduce the analysis, which includes a detailed description of all predictors and random effects (including random slopes) for mixed models.
Where appropriate, we highly encourage a ‘Statistical Analysis’ subsection in the Methods section, so that the statistics need not be described within the ‘Results’ section. There generally is not enough space within ‘Results’ sections to describe statistical procedures with sufficient detail to allow reproducibility.
If your design includes multiple items and these items are repeated across participants, please use statistical methods that address the well-known “language-as-fixed-effects fallacy” (see Clark, 1973; Raaijmakers, Schrijnemakers, & Gremmen, 1999), i.e., your analysis should somehow formally demonstrate that it generalizes across items and that participant averages are not driven by particular items (‘items analysis’); an appropriate method in many cases are mixed/multilevel models.
If reporting results from mixed models, it is important to be more specific than just reporting that your model included “random effects for participants and items” (see Barr, Levy, Scheepers, & Tily, 2013); please reference whether you used random intercepts or random slopes.
Please consider that models without theoretically important random slopes can be severely anti-conservative (see Schielzeth & Forstmeier, 2008; Barr, Levy, Scheepers, & Tily, 2013; Winter & Grice, 2021); if your model did not converge, it is important to invest considerable efforts in trying to make it converge (for solutions, see Brauer & Curtin, 2018, Table 17, or consider using Baesian models, for which convergence issues are often considerably attenuated).
If your analysis includes a model selection procedure involving multiple models, please ensure that the model selection procedure is clearly documented and that the final model that is reported in the ‘Results’ section is described in sufficient detail to allow reproducibility.
Note: It is possible to include R formulas, e.g., in a footnote.
Where appropriate, please provide an indication of the magnitude of the effect either in terms of raw values, standardized effect size statistics, or both.
Please report statistics in italics, e.g., M =, SD =, F(2, 63) = , t(42) = , χ² (1) =
Please report exact p-values rounded to two/three decimal places, e.g., p = 0.03/p = 0.003.
Please use dot (.) for decimals rather than comma (,).
If means are reported, standard deviations should be reported as well.
Percentages should be accompanied by raw counts.
To ensure reproducibility, make sure to report which statistical software you used and mention the version number (e.g., in R: R.Version()). If you used open-source software packages, cite all authors (e.g., in R: citation('lme4')) and package versions (e.g., in R: packageVersion('lme4')).

Figure captions

All figures should have captions.
Ideally, figure captions should be detailed enough for data visualizations to be interpretable without reading the body of the text.
For data visualizations that include error bars, figure captions should state which kind of error bars they are (e.g., SDs, SEs, 95% CIs).
Figure captions should provide a key to explain the use of different symbols, colours, line weights, line types etc.
Try to avoid abbreviations wherever possible but if they are needed, figure captions should provide a key to all abbreviations used (even if the abbreviations are also explained in the body of the text).

Language examples

Phonetic transcriptions should, wherever possible, employ the symbols and conventions of the IPA. Language examples in the body of the text should be placed in italics. If there is an example in another language, place it in italics and give an English gloss in single quotes, as in lui ‘he’.

It will often be appropriate to number and indent linguistic examples, such as:

(1) Adam burns the candle.

For example sentences in languages other than English, give both morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and an idiomatic translation of the sentence, as in the following:

(2) wati-ngki nga-rnu kuyu.
man-ERG eat-PAST meat
‘The man ate some meat.’

Uploading files after acceptance

After acceptance, files should be uploaded as editable Word documents or LaTeX files. As the review process is now completed, authors should include the title page with the names and affiliations of the authors within the main document.

Repository link

It is also recommended that authors replace the anonymised, or view-only, repository link in the data availability statement with a live link to their chosen data repository, unless there are grounds to keep the data restricted.

Tables and figures after acceptance

While we recommend embedding figures and tables in situ for the first submission, tables and figures have to be provided as separate files after acceptance. Indicate in the body of the text the preferred place for a table or figure. The figures need to be of sufficiently high reproduction quality.

For full information on the correct supply of graphics, go to:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/authors/journals/journals-artwork-guide

Each figure should have a title, and detailed figure captions. Tables and figures should be numbered independently of each other and of any numbered examples in the text.
Formatting of tables must adhere to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th Edition, 2019), as specified at this link: https://apastyle.apa.org/instructional-aids/tutorialswebinars
Make sure to use capital letters as sparingly as possible.
Decimal values should be aligned across cells.

Last updated: 02 January 2024

Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.

English language editing services

Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.

In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.

Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.

Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

ORCID

We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.

If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.