The Journal of Memory and Language publishes original research in the areas of human memory and language processing. The overriding
criterion for acceptance of an article for publication is that the article must make a significant scientific contribution. In most instances,
meeting this criterion requires a theoretically important, empirically substantiated advance in knowledge. The evaluation of an article's
quality takes into consideration the significance of the issue that it addresses and the precision with which the problem is specified.
The design of experiments must bear a clear and credible relation to the theoretical issues that the experiments address, and the results
of experiments must have clear theoretical implications. The research methodology and data analysis must be sound. Because the journal
aims to advance the understanding of language as well as the understanding of human cognition, statistical analyses of psycholinguistic
data are normally expected to address the reliability of the results for participants and for linguistic materials. Only original papers
will be considered.
Submission of Manuscripts
Submission items include a cover letter (as a separate file) and the manuscript
(comprising a title page, abstract, manuscript text, references, tables, figure legends, figures, and appendices). Revised manuscripts
should be accompanied by an additional file containing the Response to Reviews with a summary of how the manuscript has been changed
in response to the editor's and reviewers' comments, separate from the cover letter and the manuscript.
Manuscripts must be written
in English. All new manuscripts must be submitted to the journal web site at
http://ees.elsevier.com/jml.
Authors are asked to submit the manuscript in electronic form to this address as a single file, with a cover letter in a separate file.
Authors unable to submit an electronic version should contact the JML Editorial Office at:
Journal of Memory and Language Editorial Office 525 B Street, Suite 1900 San Diego, CA 92101-4495, USA Tel: (619) 699 6743 Fax: (619) 699 6211 E-mail: jml@elsevier.com
The names of authors will be withheld from referees if requested. In such cases, authors' names should
be removed from the title page and the author notes. There are no submission fees or page charges.
In the cover letter, authors should
state that the manuscript has not been and is not currently submitted elsewhere, and that it will not be submitted elsewhere prior to
an editorial decision. Submission of an article must have the approval of all the authors and the institution where the work was carried
out. Any person cited as a source of personal communications must approve such citation. Written authorization may be required at the
Editor's discretion. Articles and any other material published in Journal of Memory and Language represent the opinions of the
author(s) and should not be construed to reflect the opinions of the Editor(s) and the Publisher. Manuscripts that do not meet the general
criteria or standards for publication in Journal of Memory and Language will be immediately returned to the authors, without
detailed review.
Copyright and Permissions
Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to transfer copyright
(for more information on copyright, see http://www.elsevier.com/authorsrights). This transfer will ensure the widest possible
dissemination of information. A letter will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript. A form facilitating
transfer of copyright will be provided after acceptance.
If material from other copyrighted works is included, the author(s) must
obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by
authors in these cases; contact
Elsevier Global Rights Department, P.O. Box 800, Oxford OX5 1DX, UK; phone: (+44) 1865 843830; fax:
(+44) 1865 853333; e-mail: permissions@elsevier.com.
Preparation of Manuscripts
Authors are asked to follow
the instructions given in the most recent edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. When
phonetic notation is needed, use the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Manuscripts should be double-spaced throughout,
including tables, references, and footnotes. Use appropriate levels of headings in the text.
The title page should contain
the article title, author(s) names(s) (without degrees) and complete affiliation(s), and the address for manuscript correspondence (including
e-mail address and telephone and fax numbers).
The abstract must be a single paragraph that summarizes the main findings
of the paper in 100-150 words. Below the abstract give a list of three to six keywords for use by online search engines and
abstracting and indexing services.
The introduction should be as concise as possible.
Footnotes should be avoided.
Incorporate such material into text as needed.
Materials and methods should be sufficiently detailed to enable the research
to be reproduced. The term "participants" is normally preferred to "subjects." Information that pertains to the participants in more
than one experiment should be given just once (e.g., "The participants in this and the following experiments were native speakers of
English with no reported history of speech or hearing difficulties").
Give details about equipment only when they are important for
replication (e.g., there is usually no need to specify the brand of computer).
Provide stimulus lists (typically in an appendix)
for any study in which properties of the stimuli are at issue. This will almost always be the case when a critical comparison is based
on a between-items test and will often be true under other conditions as well. For appendices, text format is preferred to table format;
if tables are used, they should be highly structured. Consider listing item means along with appended stimulus materials.
Abbreviations
must be avoided unless they are in standard English usage (found in abridged dictionaries) or well-known statistical abbreviations (e.g.,
ANOVA). Even when an abbreviation is well known, spell out the term the first time it is used and follow it with the abbreviation in
parentheses. Avoid opaque condition labels and outline-style experiment labels (such as "Experiment 2A").
Statistical tests
should be accompanied by informative measures of central tendency and variability for the participant data. For maximum transparency,
these measures should be in the same units as the dependent variables. Well-motivated contrasts between means together with confidence
intervals around the contrasts (i.e., around the differences between means) give information about variability as well as effect size
in an easy-to-interpret format, and so the use of 95% confidence intervals around the differences between condition means (i.e., around
contrasts) is strongly recommended. The sizes of these confidence intervals can be reported in the text of the results section along
with relevant descriptive statistics, typically the means involved in the contrast. For complex designs, results may be more easily communicated
in graphs.
Inferential statistics, including the values of test statistics and probabilities associated with principal sources of
variance, are often best presented in tables, as advised in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
(section 3.69 in the 5th edition). Investigators who carry out separate participant and item analyses using analyses of variance or t
tests are expected to provide min-F' values corresponding to the separate participant and item statistics that they report.
Unless of particular theoretical interest, nonsignificant effects can be mentioned in passing (e.g., "remaining effects were not significant"),
without detailed statistics. Where possible, make use of confidence intervals around contrasts instead of inferential statistics in evaluating
simple effects and planned comparisons.
References should follow the citation and reference conventions set out in the most
recent edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Citations in text use the cited author's
surname and the year of publication (e.g., Murphy, 2002).
References cited in the text should be listed alphabetically and typed
double-spaced at the end of the article. Journal titles should be written out in full in accordance with the conventions of the Publication
Manual of the American Psychological Association, taking care with the use of ampersands (which are not parts of most journal titles
in psychology, with the exception of the journals of the Psychonomic Society). Only articles that have been published or are in press
should be included in the references. Please note the following examples:
Murphy, G. L. (2002). The big book of concepts.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Samuel, A. G., & Pitt, M. A. (2003). Lexical activation (and other factors) can mediate compensation
for coarticulation. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 416-434.
Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2005). Writing
systems and spelling development. In M. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), Science of reading: A handbook (pp. 120-134). Oxford,
England: Blackwell.
Make sure that all references in the text are in the reference list and vice versa. Unpublished results or personal
communications should be cited as such in the text.
Acknowledgments should not include acknowledgment of the action editor
for doing his/her job. Colleagues, reviewers, and grant support may of course be acknowledged.
Preparation of Tables
Tables
should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals in order of appearance in the text. Type each table double-spaced on a separate
page with a short descriptive title typed directly above and with essential footnotes below.
Make sure decimals are aligned; minimize
use of abbreviations and explain all abbreviations within table notes; combine tables when possible (e.g., report data on two dependent
measures in relation to the same independent variable in a single combined table). Each table should have its own number (i.e., avoid
table numbers such as Table 5a and Table 5b). Incorporate information from tables with very few entries into the text. Make sure that
all of the tables are cited in the text and that all tables are included. See the most recent edition of the Publication Manual of
the American Psychological Association for detailed instructions.
Figures that can convey the necessary information in standard black and white should be the default, but full-color reproduction
is available for figures that require this feature (e.g., standard representations of various neuroimaging results). If authors submit
usable color figures together with an accepted article, Elsevier ensures that these figures, at no additional charge, will appear in
color on the web (e.g., ScienceDirect and other sites) regardless of whether these illustrations are reproduced in color in the printed
version. For color reproduction in print, you will receive information regarding the costs from Elsevier after receipt of your accepted
article. For further information on the preparation of electronic artwork, please see
http://www.authors.elsevier.com/artworkinstructions.
Should you decide against color in print, please submit usable black-and-white files corresponding to the color illustrations, in
addition to the color files for electronic publication. The black-and-white files are needed for the printed version because of technical
complications that can arise in converting figures to gray scale.
Preparation of Supplementary Material
Supplementary
files offer additional possibilities for publishing supporting applications, movies, animation sequences, high-resolution images, background
datasets, sound clips, and more. Supplementary files supplied will be published online alongside the electronic version of your article
in Elsevier web products, including ScienceDirect at
http://www.sciencedirect.com.
Authors should submit the material in electronic format together with the article and supply a concise and descriptive caption for
each file. Please note, however, that supplementary material will not appear in the printed journal. For more detailed instructions,
please contact the editorial office: phone (619) 699 6743; fax (619) 699 6211; e-mail: jml@elsevier.com.
Production
and Proofs
Before a manuscript can appear in print, editable files are needed for production purposes. Prior to final acceptance,
authors will be required to submit source files as separate files containing the manuscript, tables, figures, and ancillary materials,
in the following order: title page, manuscript file(s), table(s), figures(s). Upload text, tables, and graphics as separate files. Please
do not insert figures or tables into the final manuscript document.
PDF proofs will be e-mailed to the corresponding author. To avoid
delay in publication, only necessary changes should be made, and corrections should be returned promptly.
Reprints
Twenty-five
reprints will be provided to the corresponding author free of charge. Additional reprints may be ordered.
