Preparing your materials

Registered Reports

You can find specific guidance about Registered Reports at the link below:
Registered Reports - Guidelines for authors and reviewers.

Aims and scope

A key publication in the field, Journal of Child Language publishes articles on all aspects of the scientific study of language behaviour in children, the principles which underlie it, and the theories which may account for it.

The international range of authors and breadth of coverage allow the journal to forge links between many different areas of research including psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology. This interdisciplinary approach spans a wide range of interests: phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and any other recognised facet of language study. Aspects of reading development are considered when there is a clear language component.

The journal normally publishes full-length empirical studies or General Articles as well as shorter Brief Research Reports. To be appropriate for this journal, articles should include some quantitative data analyses, and articles based on case studies need to have a convincing rationale for this design. The journal publishes thematic special issues on occasion, the topic and format of which are determined by the editorial team.

Manuscript types

General Articles

General Articles are full-length articles that make a substantive empirical and/or theoretical contribution and should not normally exceed 10,000 words. There should be a maximum of 60 references for an Article. In special circumstances, when the Editors judge a comprehensive review of the literature to be a central component of the Article and therefore warrants more references, they may allow up to 70 references.

Brief Research Reports

Brief Research Reports are shorter articles with smaller scope and/or smaller sample sizes and should not exceed 4,000 words. These lengths do not include the Abstract and References.

Registered Reports

JCL welcomes inquiries from authors interested in Registered Reports, an important new article type in the journal. Please familiarize yourself with the special information on Registered Reports at JCL.

Preparation of manuscripts

Authors can choose whether to submit their articles to JCL in Word or LaTeX format. You can find the class files to prepare your manuscript using LaTeX below:
JCL LaTeX Class Files

When not otherwise specified, style should follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th Edition, 2020): https://apastyle.apa.org/

Title page

Each manuscript should have a separate title page giving the title, author names, affiliations, address for correspondence, any acknowledgments, and a competing interest declaration (guidance on what this should look like is in the paragraph below).

At the top of the page, there should be a running headline of not more than 40 characters.
No pages in the main text should carry the author’s name.
On the title page, the authors’ surnames/family names should be written in block capitals.
3-5 keywords should also be placed on the title page at the bottom.
Competing interest declaration: All authors must include a competing interests declaration in their title page (see more below).
Disclosure of use of AI tools: All authors must include a statement disclosing any AI tools used during the preparation of their manuscript.

Abstract

Each copy should have an abstract on a separate page (not more than 150 words long for General Articles and 100 words for Brief Research Reports). The abstract should give the aims of the study, the general method, and the principal conclusions.

Authors of both General Articles and Brief Research Reports are encouraged to submit the abstract in a second language, in addition to the English version (e.g., in the language of the study, if relevant).

Spelling

Spelling should be consistent – either British English or American English throughout. Emphasis (which should be used sparingly) should be marked by small capitals. Technical terms, e.g., ‘cue strength’, are given in small capitals on first mention and in lower case subsequently. Standard linguistic abbreviations are in large capitals throughout, e.g., AUX, NP. Double inverted commas should be used throughout for quotations, citations of words and sentences, ~~glosses~~ and cases where a term is used with some qualifying sense, as in referring to a “gold standard” test.

Sections and headings

Articles should be clearly divided into unnumbered sections with appropriate headings, e.g., Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion. Secondary level headings should be used within these sections, e.g. Participants, Procedure. Consult the APA Manual, chapter 3, for more information about headings.

Footnotes

Footnotes should not be used unless absolutely necessary. Information that is relevant to the article should generally be included in the body of the text, eliminating the need for footnotes. If used, footnotes should not contain phonetic characters, statistics, or tables, nor should they be used simply for bibliographical information. Their reference point in the text should be clearly indicated with a superscript number at the end of the relevant sentence. The footnotes themselves should be numbered and listed on a separate sheet at the end of the article.

Ages

As a general rule, ages should be stated in years;months and – if necessary – days, like this: 1;10.22. Terms for general age ranges, such as “three-year-olds”, are also acceptable, but not “36-month-olds” or “3-year-olds”. However, for research with infants and toddlers under 2;0, it is acceptable to use months when indicating ages. When groups of children are involved, either standard deviations or ranges should be provided in the Participants section.

Language examples in the text

Phonetic transcriptions should, wherever possible, employ the symbols and conventions of the IPA.

Language examples in the body of the text should be in italics. If there is an example in a language other than English, put it in italics and give an English gloss in single quotes, as in lui ‘him’.

It will often be appropriate to number and indent linguistic examples, e.g.

(1) Adam burns the candle.
(2a) Adam ate the fish
(2b) The fish was eaten by Adam.

Examples that are excerpts of discourse interactions should also be numbered and be set out like this:

(3) (J. wants the tape recorder off. When the switch is up it is off).
J. Up that for me.
M. Can you turn that off, please.
Not ‘Off that for me’.
J. For me. Turn off.

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

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

For more information on procedures for interlinear glossing, consult the following:
www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php

Tables and figures

Tables and figures may be placed in the body of the text.

Tables should have a title above and notes/footnotes below, if necessary, to clarify any abbreviations and provide details. Figure captions should be placed below the figure. Table titles and notes and figure captions should have sufficient information for readers to understand the contents.
Originals of the figures should be supplied, with artwork of reproduction quality.
Tables should not include underlining or vertical lines, and horizontal lines should be kept to a minimum.
Use capital letters as sparingly as possible.
In tables, it is better to put % at the top of the appropriate columns rather than putting it after each result.
Decimal points for entries in a column should be aligned.
Statistical significance can be marked with asterisks (with the level of significance given in a note below).

Consult the APA Manual (chapter 5) for more information about tables and figures.

Appendices and supplementary materials

If the article includes a substantial body of data, lengthy test materials, or detailed modelling outputs, it may be best to place these in an Appendix or as Supplementary Materials (see more below).

Statistical results

Reporting of statistical results should follow guidelines in the APA Manual, chapter 4. When means are given, standard deviations should be given too. If the findings are reported in percentages, raw scores and the number of subjects/participants should usually be included. If the analysis techniques used might not be familiar to many readers, it is the author’s responsibility to ensure the explanation of the procedures and their purpose is comprehensible.

Reference in the text

References in the text should be made in one of the following two forms:

According to Snow (1990, p. 698); OR,
In the sixties and seventies, several authors published important work on combinatorial speech (Bloom, 1970; Braine, 1963; Miller & Irvin, 1964; Schlesinger, 1974).

Note that such references are in alphabetical order, and that pairs of authors are joined by '&' when the two names are in parentheses. Reference to a work with several authors should give first author and et al.

Single sentences may be quoted within paragraphs, but where more than one sentence is quoted, it is preferable to start the quotation on a new line and to indent the whole quotation and exclude the double inverted commas.

Reference list at the end

All works referred to should be listed at the end of the article in alphabetical order. The reference list should not contain any works not referred to in the text.

Authors are asked to exclude their unpublished work from the reference list. These should always be cited in the text only, as ‘unpublished observations’. If one of these has been accepted while the manuscript has been under review, then the citation can be included formally as ‘in press’, provided the author can supply evidence of its status, such as a letter of acceptance.

References should be formatted according to the APA Manual (7th Edition) in general. One exception is that DOIs are not required for works available in print. Some selected rules and examples are given here, but authors should follow APA guidelines in cases not specified here. For online ahead of print publications, see the example Paavola-Ruotsalainen et al. (2017) in the list below.

Where an author has collaborated with others, any single-author works should precede joint works. Joint works are sequenced according to the second author’s surname, and by date if the same or group of authors have written several papers. Works by the same author or group of authors should be date ordered with the earliest first.

Authors’ names should be in lower-case letters, apart from the first letter. Book titles should be in lower-case letters, apart from the first letter and any proper names, and they should be italicized. Journal titles are given in full and italicized. Run-on lines in each reference should be indented; there should not be any additional space between entries.

Books, chapters, conference papers, dissertations, and journal articles should be presented as in the following examples (note punctuation carefully):

Bates, E., Bretherton, I., & Snyder, L. (1988). From first words to grammar: individual differences and dissociable mechanisms. Cambridge University Press.

Casillas, M., & Amaral, P. (2013). Learning cues to category membership: patterns in children’s acquisition of hedges. In C. Cathcart, I.-H. Chen, G. Finley, S. Kang, C. S. Sandy, & E. Stickles (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 37(1), 33–45. doi: 10.3765/bls.v37i1.836

Clancy, P. (1985). The acquisition of Japanese. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition (pp. 75–93). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Hirsh-Pasek, K., Naigles, L., Golinkoff, R., Gleitman, L. R., & Gleitman, H. (1988). Syntactic bootstrapping: evidence from comprehension. Paper presented at the 13th Annual Boston University Child Language Conference, Boston, MA.

Mitchell, P. R., & Kent, R. D. (1990). Phonetic variation in multisyllable babbling. Journal of Child Language, 17(2), 247–65.

Paavola-Ruotsalainen, L., Lehtosaari, J., Palomäki, J., & Tervo, I. (2017). Maternal verbal responsiveness and directiveness: consistency, stability, and relations to child early linguistic development. Journal of Child Language, 1–21. doi:10.1017/S030500091700023X

Van der Feest, S. V. (2007). Building a phonological lexicon: the acquisition of the Dutch voicing contrast in perception and production (Doctoral dissertation). Radboud Repository. https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/2066/55469/55469.pdf

Last updated: 25 July 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.