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Mark Torrance

H-index: 29
Education 29%
Psychology 28%
More written production poster excitement at AMLaP2025:

Thursday PM #200 English / Norwegian cognates and false friends sites.google.com/view/helenes...

Friday AM #167: Spelling difficulty now disrupts future lexical retrieval rpubs.com/jensroes/aml...
September 3, 2025 at 9:39 PM
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.
September 3, 2025 at 9:08 PM
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.
September 3, 2025 at 8:56 PM

Reposted by Mark Torrance

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).
Helene Slaattelid Øya, PhD student
PhD phase 1 poster
sites.google.com
August 29, 2025 at 1:20 PM

Reposted by Mark Torrance

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!
August 19, 2025 at 1:27 PM

Reposted by Mark Torrance

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
August 13, 2025 at 8:31 AM

Reposted by Mark Torrance

New paper out 🎺 introducing process-based measures of automatisation in L2

The elicited imitation task is widely used as a measure of automatized L2 knowledge. However, the scoring of the task relies exclusively on product-based measures (i.e., accuracy of L2 production).
December 12, 2024 at 12:53 PM
And to be clear, the multiple spelling errors in this thread are there for illustrative purposes, and to subliminally advertise our mail order ham side hustle.
November 26, 2024 at 5:41 PM
This looks massively useful. Thanks so much to bsky.app/profile/mari... and team.
November 25, 2024 at 11:59 PM
We don't have any new data to add just at the moment, though we do have an English written image naming dataset for difficult-to-spell words to write up. In the meantime, though, this is fun and potentially useful jens-roeser.shinyapps.io/multilangapp/. Short thread here bsky.app/profile/did:...
November 25, 2024 at 11:52 PM
So please pass jens-roeser.shinyapps.io/multilangapp/ on to anyone you think might find psycholinguistic joy in exploring these data.

I was reminded to post about this bsky.app/profile/jami... from @jamiereillycog.bsky.social. Our database features there alongside much, much more.
November 25, 2024 at 11:47 PM
Or compare typing speed in different countries / languages. These are English and Italian writers. Lots of scope for post-hock hypothesizing around effects of orthographic transparency. /6
November 25, 2024 at 11:47 PM
jens-roeser.shinyapps.io/multilangapp/ will also help you find stimuli for you written picture naming experiment, or just feed you prejudice about which Europeans are the worst spellers. Below are the top 9 hardest-to-spell Snodgrass image names. Norway taking a surprise first place. /5
November 25, 2024 at 11:47 PM
Collected face-to-face. Oh how naive we were. The plot in the first post shows correlations among naming diversity, spelling diversity, mean time onset latency (RT) and mean interkey interval once output commenced. /4
November 25, 2024 at 11:47 PM
Data from samples of at least 60 adults naming all of the images from the colourised Snodgrass and Vaderwart picture set in their first language (Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). /3
November 25, 2024 at 11:47 PM
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...
November 25, 2024 at 11:47 PM

Reposted by Mark Torrance

It's that time again to update the lab's psycholinguistic database page. Lmk if you have any suggestions for stuff I've missed or sections to add (NLP, aphasia, discourse). Any suggestions for improving this hub would be most appreciated. www.reilly-coglab.com/data
Psycholinguistic Databases, Stimuli, Utilities — Concepts & Cognition Laboratory
www.reilly-coglab.com
November 24, 2024 at 1:24 AM
And me. Cognitive and educational psychology of written production.
November 23, 2024 at 1:11 PM
...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)
November 6, 2024 at 8:47 PM
I don't normally post about preprints but I'm really quite excited about this one (and I ought to actually post something here).

Typing in tandem: language planning in multi-sentence text production is fundamentally parallel. https://osf.io/preprints/osf/qr58k

"Competent writers... (1/2)
November 6, 2024 at 8:47 PM

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