Each month, the open access team of the University of Groningen Library (UB) puts a recent open access article by UG authors in the spotlight. This publication is highlighted via social media and the library’s newsletter and website.

The article in the spotlight for the month of June 2024 is titled A Universal Cognitive Bias in Word Order: Evidence From Speakers Whose Language Goes Against It, written by Alexander Martin (assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts), David Adger (Queen Mary University of London, Klaus Abels (University College London), Patrick Kanampiu and Jennifer Culbertson (both from the University of Edinburgh).

Abstract

There is a long-standing debate in cognitive science surrounding the source of commonalities among languages of the world. Indeed, there are many potential explanations for such commonalities—accidents of history, common processes of language change, memory limitations, constraints on linguistic representations, and so on. Recent research has used psycholinguistic experiments to provide empirical evidence linking common linguistic patterns to specific features of human cognition, but these experiments tend to use English speakers, who in many cases have direct experience with the common patterns of interest. Here we highlight the importance of testing populations whose languages go against cross-linguistic trends. We investigate whether adult monolingual speakers of Kîîtharaka, which has an unusual way of ordering words, mirror the word-order preferences of English speakers. We find that they do, supporting the hypothesis that universal cognitive representations play a role in shaping word order.

We asked first and corresponding author Alexander Martin a few questions about the article:

This journal assigns Open Practices badges to articles to acknowledge open scientific practices, your article received badges for Open Data and Open Materials. Is this the first time you publish with a journal that uses this badge system? What do you think of it?

This is my second experience publishing in Psychological Science and receiving Open Practice badges for Open Data and Open Materials. It's nice to know when you open a paper what materials are available to you as a reader, but I hope that we're moving towards a time when these badges won't be necessary. It should be standard practice to make (pseudo-)anonymized data and materials available where possible.

You made all stimulus materials and anonymized coded data, along with the full data cooking and analysis notebook and extended method description available on Open Science Framework (OSF). What were the main challenges of sharing the underlying data? Why did you choose this platform (OSF)? 

Depending on the kind of data you are working with, making it available to readers can be more or less challenging. In the case of this paper, for example, we recorded participants producing sentences. We don't want to share these recordings openly, but what they contain is important in order for readers to be able to follow our analysis. What we shared is the anonymous, coded data, so that readers can go back and see what a participant said on a given trial, without revealing personally identifying information (like a person's voice) unnecessarily. 

The Open Science Framework is a great resource for stocking and sharing data and materials, and also provides a place to store pre-registrations of analysis plans before you begin data collection. It also provides the functionality to share an anonymous read-only link that can be used during review, so reviewers can access your data and materials without compromising the anonymity of peer review.

The section ‘Transparency’ acknowledges all contributors and clearly states the role they each played in the study. What do you think of this practice?

Psychological Science requires a transparency statement which gives authors the opportunity to indicate how each person contributed to the final product. In some cases, I think this system helps give junior authors more recognition for the immense amount of work they put into projects, but like any open science practice, it's more about taking time to reflect on what you're doing (and in this case, who did what) than any kind of fraud prevention.

Could you reflect on your experiences with open access and open science in general?

Open access has become a key component of knowledge sharing in recent years. Staff at universities in the Netherlands can publish open access in a great many number of journals at no additional costs to them thanks to collective bargaining (and that is the case for this current paper), but this isn't my preferred method to publish in open access. I am a huge supporter of community-run journals that abide by FAIR open access principles, that maintain transparency at all levels, and that do not exploit the labour of scientists for profit. For-profit publishing houses that charge incomprehensible fees to make articles open access are a dying breed and I look forward to a future where all journals are run for and by the scientific community. In my field, linguistics, there has been a revolution of editorial boards of leading journals run by for-profit publishing houses who collectively resign and found a diamond open access journal in its place. The initiative Linguistics in Open Access currently lists 42 diamond open access journals across the various subfields of linguistics. I hope to see this situation across all fields of knowledge production in the coming years.

Useful links:

COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) provides guidelines regarding authorship and contributorship

Open Science Framework: a platform maintained by the Center for Open Science that helps researchers conduct research more rigorously, and manage and share their work more openly.

Citation:

Martin, A., Adger, D., Abels, K., Kanampiu, P., & Culbertson, J. (2024). A Universal Cognitive Bias in Word Order: Evidence From Speakers Whose Language Goes Against It. Psychological Science, 35(3), 304-311. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231222836

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