Skip to content

TRUST Network

The TRUST network aims to build a transparent, transferable, and sustainable foundation for psycholinguistic reading studies in German. The Network brings together more than 20 researchers in the field to develop transferable and sustainable guidelines that address critical challenges such as:

  • methodological robustness
  • reproducibility
  • generalisability
  • statistical power

The TRUST is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and will run under the umbrella of German Word Nerd Network (GeWoNN).

This Guideline page is the result of our first meeting, which started a consensus-based guideline generation process. We began defining the core guidelines in our first meeting. In a second step, we wrote a text document, which was then commented on by the TRUST members. Next, we included the comments and implemented this guideline page. Next we implemented a survey that included all the points form the text document. In the survey, every member had to rate the importance of each guideline issue (on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 = low and 5 = high) and could provide additional feedback.

The guidelines on this page now include guidelines after two rounds of feedback from the TRUST consortium, and the TRUST consortium's importance rating depicted by these bars (Median importance rated by consortium members):

Rating 1/5: Importance Rating 2 Rating 2/5: Importance Rating 2 Rating 3/5: Importance Rating 2 Rating 4/5: Importance Rating 2 Rating 5/5: Importance Rating 2

In parallel to developing the guidelines, we implemented the German Lexicon Project, a large-scale lexical decision study in German (see all details HERE).

TRUST Network Mission

The goal of TRUST is to increase the quality of current reading research practices. We aim to establish best-practice and collective research guidelines for the field, providing an optimal, transparent, and sustainable basis for across-lab investigations.

In the network, we bring together a group of expert researchers to compile:

  1. Transparent and consensual guidelines for single-word reading research in skilled native-speaking German adult readers
  2. Transferable guidelines: an annotated version of the same German guidelines which will allow researchers to adapt them to different languages, participant samples (e.g., beginning readers, dyslexics), and paradigms (e.g., single word or text presentation)
  3. Sustainable guidelines: strategies to ensure that future studies in mono- and multilingual reading research have a common, regularly updated foundation for implementing high-quality investigations.

© 2026 The German Word Nerd Network
Visit the GEWONN site