We would like to thank our two retiring Associate Editors, Brian Richards and Cliff Pye. Their broad knowledge and excellent judgement have been invaluable in evaluating and editing manuscripts for the journal over many, many years. Brian has been an Associate Editor for over twelve years and Cliff for seven. While it is always sad to say farewell to such excellent colleagues, we are pleased to announce that we have two new Associate Editors: Erika Hoff and Kamil Ud Deen. We know that the expertise of these two outstanding researchers and scholars will be invaluable in helping our editorial team keep up the high standards of JCL.

We have been editors now for two years. During that time (mid 2006) we switched to electronic submissions. There have been a few teething problems but we are pleased to say that the switch has been relatively smooth, thanks to the hard work of Miles Lambert, our Editorial Assistant, and it has been highly advantageous in helping cut down the turn-around time. Our long-term aim is to provide an initial decision on a manuscript within four months of submission, and since moving to electronic submission the average turn-around time has been reduced to four and a half months. We do ask that authors check our Instructions to Contributors (available in PDF format on the JCL website) before submitting a manuscript, since we have made several changes. For example, previously we invited submissions of Research Papers and Notes. The Notes category has been replaced with Brief Research Reports, with a limit of 4000 words and 25 references. We will also be continuing to publish occasional Review and Commentary papers.

We are deeply grateful to the many members of the child language research community who have shared their expertise with the journal in the form of reviewing submitted manuscripts. Knowledgeable and fair reviews are the core of the editorial process.