About the Journal

Field Editor-In-Chief: Manuel Carreiras, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Spain
Abbreviation: Front. Psychology
NLM ID: Coming Soon
Indexed in: Google Scholar, PubMed and PsycInfo coming soon

Frontiers in Language Sciences is a specialty section of Frontiers in Psychology devoted to understanding the cognitive and brain mechanisms that support language processing-acquisition, comprehension and production. Language is a unique human ability present in most activities of everyday life. Work in the language sciences includes areas such as speech perception and production, reading, writing, language acquisition, comprehension and production in oral and signed languages, processing in bilingualism and multilingualism, and neurodegeneration and language disorders. The scope includes orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse. To understand language processing, it has become increasingly important to examine how language processes unfold during child development, mature in adulthood and often decline in aging and dementia, and how these processes are altered in developmental, neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as aphasia, specific language impairment, dyslexia and dementia. In recent years, there have been impressive theoretical and methodological advances in this field, which have been accompanied by technical developments that have led to sophisticated methodological approaches, such as computational linguistics, large corpus analyses, computational modeling, experimental paradigms using behavioral methods (e.g., reaction times, accuracy and eyetracking), and the use of advanced neuroimaging techniques (e.g., ERPs, MEG and fMRI) to investigate the neural bases of language. This has provided key insights into the mechanisms of language processing in infants and adults, monolinguals and bilinguals, clinical and other populations. Work in the language sciences has influenced many areas of inquiry ranging from neuroscience to education. Thus, our section will provide a forum for research in the language sciences spanning all areas of inquiry using rigorous research approaches.

Frontiers in Language Sciences welcomes the following tier 1 article types: original research articles, simulation studies, review articles, hypothesis and theory articles, methods articles, commentaries, perspective articles, opinion articles, book reviews and conference proceedings. All articles must be submitted directly to Frontiers in Language Sciences where they are processed by the associate and review editors of the specialty section.

All articles published in Frontiers in Language Sciences will be subjected to the Frontiers evaluation system after online publication. Authors of the original research articles with the highest impact, as judged by many expert readers, will be invited by the editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Psychology to write a prestigious Frontiers focused review – a tier 2 article. This is referred to as "democratic tiering". The selection is based on the reader impact over a 3-month period from the date of publication. The selected high impact articles are re-written in a review style centered on the original discovery and aim to address the wider audience across all of psychology.

Frontiers’ philosophy is that all research is for the benefit of mankind. It is enabled by society and should be returned to all people without borders or discrimination. That is why Frontiers provides open and free access to all of its publications. For more information on the open access movement click here.

Under the Frontiers terms and conditions you retain the copyright of your work. This means that you may reproduce copies of your articles in any way you choose and freely disseminate these as reprints, as long as the original publication is fully cited. For instance, your published article can be posted on your personal or institutional homepage, e-mailed to friends and colleagues, printed, archived in a collection, distributed on CD-ROM, quoted in the press, translated and furthermore sent to as many people and as often as you wish.

Each Frontiers article is a landmark of the highest quality, due to true collaborative interactions between authors and the highest quality reviewers. Frontiers recognizes the immense importance of the potential impact of published research on future research and society and, hence, does not support superficial review, light review or no review publishing models. Research knowledge must be validated by peers before entering the stream of knowledge that will eventually reach the public and shape society. Therefore, Frontiers supports the highest quality reviews and operates according to the novel Frontiers academic model that applies a rigorous but unbiased Frontiers review system, a separated, online, automated and global Frontiers evaluation system and Frontiers distillation system, as well as the Frontiers recognition system to reward the most outstanding research selected by the entire community.