Mannheim papers in multilingualism, acquisition and change is an international peer-reviewed journal focussing on multilingualism, acquisition and change from an interdisciplinary perspective. The aim is to promote interdisciplinary research on modelling language acquisition in diachrony from the perspective of historical linguistics, psycholinguistics and mathematical modelling.

Areas include: the bilingual and multilingual speaker/hearer and writer, learnability, mathematically modelling of acquisition and change, agents of change in acquisition, changes in the input, the structure of the input, contact-induced change, models of change, and methods to empirically investigate these phenomena. To encourage debate in the new field of historical psycholinguistics we also aim at publishing high-quality keynote articles and peer commentaries of invited experts in the respective fields.

Submissions should consist of original work that has not been previously published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Papers should reflect fundamental research and use the research methodologies and the theoretical and modelling approaches of the disciplines within which the research was conducted: theoretical or descriptive linguistics, experimental, computational or developmental psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, etc. The overriding criterion for consideration and subsequent acceptance, after peer review, is that papers make a truly theoretical or empirical contribution to the fields mentioned above.

Alongside full-length articles (12,000 words), squibs of up to 3,000 words and book reviews will also be solicited.

Contributors should not feel restricted by the traditional limitations of print journals. The use of hyperlinks is encouraged and appendices submitted alongside the manuscript may include analysed data or corpus query files, with no limit on length within reason.

Keynote Articles. Keynote articles will be commissioned by the editors. They should substantially contribute to the promotion of historical psycholinguistics. They should discuss the relation between acquisition and change, either empirically, or theoretically.

Keynote articles will be accompanied by commentaries, which the editors will select. Accepted commentaries will be sent to the authors of keynote articles so that they may prepare their response (also subject to review). Keynote articles should not exceed 12,000 words in length (including footnotes, but not including abstract, references, tables and figures) and should include an abstract of no more than 150 words. Peer commentaries should not exceed 3,000 words and deal with one aspect discussed in the keynote article.

Language. The language of the journal is English. 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 is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the editor and any reviewers.

Spelling. Either British or American spelling may be used, consistently throughout the paper.

 

 We modelled our text on the Journal of Historical Syntax (Editor-in-Chief: George Walkden).