Articles in the Journal of Memory and Language contribute to the formulation of scientific issues and theories in the broad areas of memory and language (learning, comprehension and production). The journal's focus is on describing the mental processes that underpin these capacities. Special emphasis is given to research articles that provide new theoretical insights based on a carefully laid empirical foundation. The journal generally favors articles that provide multiple experiments. In addition, significant theoretical or computational papers without new experimental findings may be published.

The Journal of Memory and Language is a valuable tool for cognitive scientists, including psychologists, linguists, and others interested in memory and learning, language, reading, and speech.

Special Issue on Nonveridical Language Comprehension
Día de Entrega: 2026-01-31

This Special Issue of the Journal of Memory and Language will bring together state-of-the art contributions on the topic of nonveridical language comprehension.

Guest editors:

Kiel K. Christianson - University of Illinois
Dario Paape - University of Potsdam

Special issue information:

A substantial quantity of recent psycholinguistic research has focused on comprehenders' inaccurate representations of linguistic input. Such nonveridical comprehension can be either a bug or a feature. Nonveridical comprehension can result in comprehension failure, such as when a reader or listener fails to successfully reanalyze a garden path sentence. But nonveridical comprehension can also lead to successfully inferring a speaker or writer's intended message, despite input that is in fact implausible or ungrammatical; in this case, nonveridical comprehension results in communication success.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Memory and Language will bring together state-of-the art contributions on this topic. We welcome psycholinguistic research investigating the nature, causes, and consequences of mismatches between the language input and the comprehender's mental representation of that input. This includes, but is not limited to, research on:

--garden-path misinterpretation
--'noisy-channel' edits/inference
--'local coherence' effects
--grammaticality illusions (e.g., agreement attraction, illusory licensing)
--semantic illusions (comparative illusions, depth-charge sentences, Moses illusions)
--letter, word, and thematic-role transposition effects
--syntactic underspecification or “good-enough” processing

We welcome work that explores what nonveridical language comprehension can tell us about cognition in general, and work that is informed by explicit computational models. We welcome submissions that investigate these phenomena in diverse languages and in diverse populations, including developmental, aging, non-WEIRD, multilingual, and L2 populations. As with all JML submissions, we emphasize both empirical rigor and theoretical impact. Submissions must follow JML's open science requirements; see in particular the "Materials, Data, and Analysis Code Transparency" section of the Guide for Authors.

Manuscript submission information:

Submission Due Date: 31 January 2026

Authors should select the article type of 'VSI: Nonveridical Language Comprehension' in the editorial system of the journal, to make sure their paper is grouped under this special issue. 

Keywords:

language comprehension, fallibility, illusions, inference, misinterpretation