I'm presenting a poster at the HSP conference for human sentence processing on Saturday March 28 2026 at the MIT, MA. Come along if you want to chat about written sentence production and spelling. Poster is here. rpubs.com/jensroes/hsp...

Many interesting UG Psychology projects this year! If your native language is Bisaya and you're competent in English, please consider helping out my student. See the poster below for more information. Link to the experiment: research.sc/participant/...

One of my final year students is conducing an interesting study on Quran Arabic. If you match the eligibility criteria in the poster below please consider taking part and helping him. Thanks. Link to the experiment: lnkd.in/eVzvWinE

Thanks @marktorrance.bsky.social for posting this. This is the preprint of a brief paper written for the BPS Cognitive Psychology Bulletin @bpsofficial.bsky.social

Mark Torrance@marktorrance.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Flow in mind, flow in fingers: Parallelism in written language production - explore.bps.org.uk/content/bpsc... A short paper summarising some of the things we've been thinking about recently. With, we believe, application beyond written production. @sentwrite.bsky.social

Two talks on spelling at @exppsychsoc.bsky.social at UCL. - How do you spell "hånd" in English: Does knowing another language affect word retrieval? - "Write here, write now": Spelling difficulty disrupts parallel planning in sentence production. Program can be found at eps.ac.uk/wp-content/u...

This rather pretty plot shows correlations among measures from adult writers providing written names for pictures of everyday objects in one of 14 (yes 14) different European languages. Courtesy of jens-roeser.shinyapps.io/multilangapp/ . A short thread follows...

Writers composing multi-sentence texts often pause briefly, glance back at isolated words or short phrases, then continue writing. We think we have evidence that this cues what to say next. rpubs.com/mark-torranc... or, better, talk to me on Thursday morning at #AMLAP25.

This paper, of which I'm inordinately proud, is now out in JEP-General doi.apa.org/doi/10.1037/.... Huge credit to Jens Roeser @sentwrite.bsky.social for conception and all the heavy lifting.

Mark Torrance@marktorrance.bsky.social · 2y ago

...often experience “flow” when composing text. Ideas seem to emerge from the fingers as you type. Our findings suggest that this results from a fundamental parallelism in how the mind plans and executes text." (2/2)

Understanding written composition as fluent, semi-parallel process with occasional hesitations - work led by @sentwrite.bsky.social. We might possibly have already mentioned doi.apa.org/doi/10.1037/... And... 2/

Paper in Language and Cognition with @marktorrance.bsky.social and @seriousstats.bsky.social We show that semantic contrast shapes timing of pre-planning in speech and writing. doi.org/10.1017/lang... If you're into how context shapes how we plan language, check it out!

Psychologists assume that bilinguals have shared mental representations of their languages. However most research comes from languages that are relatively similar. We tested bilinguals in languages that are typologically different to challenge this idea. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Teasing apart the impact of different forms of overlap on cross-linguistic structural priming

In the current paper, we examined the extent to which cross-linguistic structural priming effects can be found in genetically-unrelated languages, assessing the sensitivity of priming to varying de...

tandfonline.com

"What effect has knowing multiple languages or even languages with two different scripts such as English and Arabic on people's ability to communicate meaning in writing?" Together with @marktorrance.bsky.social, our final year UG students will explore this exciting topic this year.

Our mind translates ideas into language in a remarkable speed. When we asked people to describe pictures, they often respond in only 1 sec. That's because our mind priorities quick responses over fully developed utterances and even more so in writing than speaking. psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-...

We thoroughly enjoyed our discussions at #AMLaP2025. Thanks to everyone who came by to talk to us about spelling and what we can learn from it about how peope produce language.

Spelling can be tricky but imagine switching between two spelling systems where some words are spelled differently ("hånd" in Norwegian) and others look similar ("gift" in Norwegian isn't nice). Check out Helene's research (poster 200 on Thursday Afternoon, 4 Sept. 2025 at #AMLaP in Prague).

My first `posterdown` adventure using @posit.co . The poster for AMLaP 2025 in Prague can now be found here: rpubs.com/jensroes/aml...

If you want to chat about how difficulty with word spelling affects our ability to produce language, please come to the poster sessions on Friday Morning, 5 September 2025 at the AMLaP conference in Prague and say hi :) amlap2025.ff.cuni.cz/poster-sessi... Look out for "Write here, write now!"

When do we actually think about what we want to say and what words to use? Interestingly our mind does a lot of this work while we're writing text. In fact, we demonstrated (psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...) that even young writers often don't stop before starting a new sentence. Way to multitask!

How do we explore how spelling affects our ability to push keys on a keyboard or to move a pen. Well, one way is to get you to face the limits of your spelling skills when naming everyday objects. For example, what would you call the object in the gif below? I'd have to ask google to get it right.

a person 's hand is pointing at a tray of meringue cookies with the hashtag #micocina rapida above it

ALT: a person 's hand is pointing at a tray of meringue cookies with the hashtag #micocina rapida above it

media.tenor.com

Ever wondered what happens in our mind when we write simple messages, posts, or full essays? Also how can psychologists tests theories about writing? English is known for it's tricky spelling rules which allows psychologists to study what's going on, when things are going wrong.

a cat is looking at a laptop computer screen with a lot of text on it .

ALT: a cat is looking at a laptop computer screen with a lot of text on it .

media.tenor.com