Back to the Future: Do Influential Results from 1980s Psycholinguistics Replicate?
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Experimental psychologists have been concerned with issues of replicability, with several reports of failures to replicate well-known findings (e.g. Stack et al. 2018). Replication has received less attention in psycholinguistics, which is a lost opportunity since our field is uniquely positioned to highlight the opportunities and challenges associated with conducting replication studies, particularly regarding issues of direct versus conceptual replication. Because research practices change, analysis techniques advance, and language evolves so that past stimuli may no longer appropriately instantiate key linguistic manipulations, direct replications are often difficult in psycholinguistics. It is important to ascertain whether past findings replicate given that some past studies may not conform to current best practices.