The Journal of Child Language is pleased to welcome new Editors in Chief, Elma Blom and Melanie Soderstrom, from January 2024. The new Editors have shared some thoughts about the history and future of the journal below.

Q1: What’s your history with JCL? JCL and I go back a long way. I remember some very important articles for my PhD research that were published in JCL! During the last decade(s) I did a bit of reviewing for JCL, guest-edited four special issues (including the double special issue with Melanie), and I have served as an Associate Editor for several years.

Q2: What future directions (or initiatives) are you most looking forward to explore for JCL in the coming years? Working towards more Open Science and equality in science and publishing will be a priority.

On a very different note: I just read an article on joint attention, which is often seen as a precursor of language development in children, in great apes. I do think that we might learn a lot from in-depth observations of language and communication in other animals.

Q3: What types of research are you hoping to publish in JCL? JCL welcomes high quality research that covers all aspects of child language development, approaches child language development from different theoretical and conceptual perspectives as well as methodologies. What I like very much about JCL is that it is one of the few journals in our field that publishes in-depth case studies on the development of languages that are not or hardly studied. I hope that we will continue to publish this type of research.

Q4: What are some of the most exciting articles JCL has recently published? That is a question I cannot answer. I have a broad interest in child language and there are just too many exciting articles!

Elma Blom received her PhD in 2003 from Utrecht University. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and University of Alberta before returning to Utrecht University, and joining the Arctic University of Norway as an adjunct professor. Her research is concerned with multilingual development and language disorders, and she has a special interest in relationships between domain-general cognition and language development. 

Q1: What’s your history with JCL? Like Elma, my history with JCL goes back to my graduate school days, at the turn of the millennium. I have fond memories of hanging out in the stacks photocopying old articles from JCL. I would always go to find one article and see 3 or 4 others that I just had to add to my reading list! I was delighted to be invited to join the ranks of AEs several years ago, and I’m looking forward to turning our work together as joint guest-editors a few years ago into something more.

Q2: What future directions (or initiatives) are you most looking forward to explore for JCL in the coming years? I am really excited to build on our recent moves toward supporting registered reports. At the same time, more traditional submission approaches will continue to be an important part of JCL. Much of the work that we publish is non-experimental and/or exploratory, or examines hard-to-access populations, and not all of these fit well within the RR model. I want JCL to do more to support diversifying the populations and languages we consider in our research.

Q3: What types of research are you hoping to publish in JCL? I want JCL to continue to be a place where diverse perspectives, methods and theories converge in the pursuit of understanding child language development – where computational linguists are in dialog with cognitive psychologists and anthropologists, and anyone else with something of value to contribute.

Q4: What are some of the most exciting articles JCL has recently published? Like Elma, I’ll let the great works from the last few years speak for themselves!

Melanie Soderstrom received her PhD in 2002 from Johns Hopkins University, and conducted postdoctoral research at Brown University before joining the University of Manitoba. Her research is focused on infant-directed speech and language environments, using both perceptual and observational methods. She has been active in the movement toward large-scale collaborative research in developmental science.