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Mark Torrance

H-index: 29
Education 29%
Psychology 28%
marktorrance.bsky.social
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...
marktorrance.bsky.social
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.
marktorrance.bsky.social
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.
Image showing research design from poster linked in text.

Reposted by: Mark Torrance

sentwrite.bsky.social
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

Reposted by: Mark Torrance

sentwrite.bsky.social
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!

Reposted by: Mark Torrance

sentwrite.bsky.social
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

Reposted by: Mark Torrance

dagmardivjak.bsky.social
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).
marktorrance.bsky.social
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.
marktorrance.bsky.social
This looks massively useful. Thanks so much to bsky.app/profile/mari... and team.
marktorrance.bsky.social
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:...
marktorrance.bsky.social
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.
marktorrance.bsky.social
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
marktorrance.bsky.social
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
marktorrance.bsky.social
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
marktorrance.bsky.social
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
marktorrance.bsky.social
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...
Plot showing pairwise correlations.

Reposted by: Mark Torrance

reilly-coglab.com
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
marktorrance.bsky.social
And me. Cognitive and educational psychology of written production.
marktorrance.bsky.social
...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)
marktorrance.bsky.social
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)

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