2026 big update to the psycholinguistic database page! If you know of corpora, lexical databases, or other resources that I've missed, please LMK. Trying to keep this thing relatively current and could use the help www.reilly-coglab.com/data

Martínez-Cano et al identified narrative characteristics in writing by people with schizophrenia to determine how these relate to positive and negative symptomatology. Results reveal that language difficulties occur in writing and allow for symptom differentiation. www.jowr.org/jowr/article...

I'm very excited about this paper with @yngwienielsen.bsky.social just out in @nathumbehav.nature.com in which we provide evidence for the mental representation of non-hierarchical linguistic structure in language use. 🧵 1/4 Read the paper here: rdcu.be/eZ26u

Hello Bluesky! Journal of Writing Research is bringing the conversation to this platform. We'll start by highlighting some of the fascinating research in our most recent volume.

𝑫𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒖𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒆𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒔𝒕𝒚𝒍𝒆𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑷𝑬𝑹𝑺𝑼𝑨𝑫𝑬 𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒑𝒖𝒔- Morris, Crossley, Holmes, and Choi. This article explores how high-quality persuasive essays differ in the linguistic features used, challenging the assumption that excellent writing is a single, uniform style. (vol. 17, no. 2)

My talk here: rpubs.com/mark-torranc... - Direct evidence (we think) that looking back into your text while writing serves to maintain output fluency. All the hard work done by Astha Singh (Iowa State University). Her ACL paper is linked from the final slide.

Meet multilangapp's younger sister Spellname App. We're still work in progress but try the "Density plots" tab and click on the legend keys. This is `plotly`.

When writers produce multi-sentence text they periodically pause and look back into what they've written. We describe this behaviour in adult L1 and inexpert L2 composition. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... This brings together methods / ideas from two research streams... 1/

Paper in Language and Cognition with @marktorrance.bsky.social and @seriousstats.bsky.social We show that semantic contrast shapes timing of pre-planning in speech and writing. doi.org/10.1017/lang... If you're into how context shapes how we plan language, check it out!

More written production poster excitement at AMLaP2025: Thursday PM #200 English / Norwegian cognates and false friends sites.google.com/view/helenes... Friday AM #167: Spelling difficulty now disrupts future lexical retrieval rpubs.com/jensroes/aml...

Spelling can be tricky but imagine switching between two spelling systems where some words are spelled differently ("hånd" in Norwegian) and others look similar ("gift" in Norwegian isn't nice). Check out Helene's research (poster 200 on Thursday Afternoon, 4 Sept. 2025 at #AMLaP in Prague).

When do we actually think about what we want to say and what words to use? Interestingly our mind does a lot of this work while we're writing text. In fact, we demonstrated (psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...) that even young writers often don't stop before starting a new sentence. Way to multitask!

This paper, of which I'm inordinately proud, is now out in JEP-General doi.apa.org/doi/10.1037/.... Huge credit to Jens Roeser @sentwrite.bsky.social for conception and all the heavy lifting.

Writers composing multi-sentence texts often pause briefly, glance back at isolated words or short phrases, then continue writing. We think we have evidence that this cues what to say next. rpubs.com/mark-torranc... or, better, talk to me on Thursday morning at #AMLAP25.

Ever wondered what happens in our mind when we write simple messages, posts, or full essays? Also how can psychologists tests theories about writing? English is known for it's tricky spelling rules which allows psychologists to study what's going on, when things are going wrong.

New paper out 🎺 introducing process-based measures of automatisation in L2 The elicited imitation task is widely used as a measure of automatized L2 knowledge. However, the scoring of the task relies exclusively on product-based measures (i.e., accuracy of L2 production).

This looks massively useful. Thanks so much to bsky.app/profile/mari... and team.

This rather pretty plot shows correlations among measures from adult writers providing written names for pictures of everyday objects in one of 14 (yes 14) different European languages. Courtesy of jens-roeser.shinyapps.io/multilangapp/ . A short thread follows...

It's that time again to update the lab's psycholinguistic database page. Lmk if you have any suggestions for stuff I've missed or sections to add (NLP, aphasia, discourse). Any suggestions for improving this hub would be most appreciated. www.reilly-coglab.com/data

I don't normally post about preprints but I'm really quite excited about this one (and I ought to actually post something here). Typing in tandem: language planning in multi-sentence text production is fundamentally parallel. https://osf.io/preprints/osf/qr58k "Competent writers... (1/2)