PCSY-D-24-00007

How position in the network determines the fate of lexical innovations on Twitter

PLOS Complex Systems

Dear Dr. Chevrot,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Complex Systems. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Complex Systems's publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript within 60 days May 11 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at complexsystems@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pcsy/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Jennifer Badham

Academic Editor

PLOS Complex Systems

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

This is an interesting application of network diffusion and I would welcome a revised resubmission. As it stands however, the paper is unbalanced. As well as considering the included reviewer comments, please consider how the paper fits together:

(1) There is too much background about the linguistic theory that is not relevant to the readers of PLOS Complex Systems - it would help readers to focus on the specific debate that the research addresses

(2) There is too little information about methodology. For example, allocation of words to 'change' or 'buzz' and assignment to diffusion phase are handled by reference to a separate paper except to state that they more closely follow a sigmoidal or guassian distribution over time. However, these decisions are critical to the submitted paper and the included analysis. A short description should be available to readers so they can follow your argument without reading the other paper, with the referenced paper available for details if required. For example, it is unclear how you determine truncation issues - what happens to words that appear toward the end of your time period and do not have a fixation/decline period. I think this is handled by the fact that the initial appearance is the early part of the time period of the corpus, but this is not obvious from the information available withing the paper.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Complex Systems’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Complex Systems does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Overall, the paper titled "How Position in the Network Determines the Fate of Lexical Innovations on Twitter" holds promise in its exploration of the dynamics of lexical innovations on the platform. However, there are several areas that require attention to enhance clarity and rigor.

While the paper initially piques interest, a significant portion is dedicated to well-established and known theories. The authors should streamline these sections and allocate more space to explaining essential aspects in greater detail. Moreover, the paper lacks crucial details, and more experimental findings and graphics are needed to bolster its quality and credibility.

Specifically, from line 239 to 244, a graphical representation would significantly enhance understanding. Adding a figure depicting the phenomenon discussed during this section would aid readers in visualizing the concepts being conveyed

The method of collecting the 650 million tweets is not adequately explained. It is essential to provide a clear and detailed description of the data collection process to ensure transparency and reproducibility.

The paper mentions the removal of tweets from bots (line 285) without explaining the methodology used for identifying and excluding them. A detailed explanation of the bot detection method is crucial for the readers to evaluate the reliability of the data.

In the "Lexical Innovations" section, the explanation could benefit from graphical representations, particularly illustrating the three phases of diffusion. Visual aids would facilitate comprehension and engagement.

A bar chart highlighting the top 20 control words could significantly enhance the presentation and understanding of the data in the "Control Words" section.

Lines 464 and 476 indicate references not found. The authors should address this issue by either providing the missing references or correcting the citations.

The paper lacks explicitly stated research questions, and the main contribution is not clear. Authors should explicitly outline their research questions and emphasize the unique contributions of their work.

In conclusion, the paper has potential but requires substantial revisions to address the mentioned concerns. Clarity, graphical representation, methodological transparency, and a more explicit presentation of research questions and contributions are essential for improving the overall quality of the manuscript.

Reviewer #2: This is a valuable and exciting paper, providing a nuanced empirical test of some longstanding, mostly untested sociolinguistic hypotheses concerning the diffusion of linguistic variables through populations and the network characteristics of innovators. The paper builds upon and advances the analysis in the same authors’ 2022 paper, e.g. by using community detection.

My suggestions are few. I will begin with the only one that I consider especially important:

The paper does a nice job connecting the main results back to the hypotheses advanced by the Milroys and by Labov. I would suggest, however, saying more about the difference between phonetic / phonological variables (the focus of the Milroys’ work and most of Labov’s work) and lexical variables. We can reasonably make different predictions about the diffusion of these distinct kinds of variables through networks, even at the level of the individual speaker, especially given the fact that this paper is dealing at least in part with adults. A few reasons:

• Plenty of evidence indicates that individual adult speakers don’t shift their vowels mechanistically as a function of network position; indeed, individual speakers who move to new dialect regions as adults tend to retain the regional vocalic forms they acquired as children. Lexical variables are more malleable, in part because they are more likely to evoke explicit commentary from others. (As one example: I’m from the ever-shrinking part of the U.S. that uses the word ‘pop’ to refer to carbonated drinks such as Coke. But now that I live in a different region, I’m shifting to ‘soda’ in order to avoid negative evaluation.)

• Phonetic and phonological variables, together with syntactic and morphological variables, are generally constrained by internal (linguistic) factors as well as social factors. In this way, they are more ‘complex’ and therefore more difficult to acquire than lexical variables. This is one reason that we don’t normally see ‘buzz’-type non-lexical changes (or at least we don’t have a lot of empirical evidence of their occurrence on a scale of months or even several years).

• Individual speakers often don’t realize to what extent they participate in sound changes or even stable, strongly regional phonological variables such as mergers. For example, in the U.S., many speakers have no idea whether they have the pin/pen merger, and (famously) many speakers in the Inland North dialect region believe incorrectly that they don’t participate in the Northern Cities Chain Shift. In contrast, it is easier for speakers to correctly assess their lexical practices.

My concern here is that readers will assume that the results shown in this paper for lexical variables can be unproblematically extended to all cases of linguistic change. The investigation of the network factors influencing non-lexical change remains important, and is further motivated by the present analysis.

Regarding the 4 network variables (line 333 and following): These are good choices of network variables, but I suggest saying briefly why you chose these particular network characteristics, and if possible cite a few studies that have used the same or similar network variables in service of comparable goals. In addition, I note that the choice of these variables seems quite well motivated by the preceding discussion of social network research in sociolinguistics; perhaps this connection could be made just a bit more explicit.

There are several word-level factors that are not mentioned in the paper, probably due to space constraints and statistical modeling decisions, that could interact with the network effects. Here are two:

• Length of phase: I imagine that there’s quite a bit of variability across lexical innovations (changes in particular, in contrast with buzzes) in the time it took to reach propagation and fixation/decline. I understand that phase length has been standardized in the present analysis, but could the authors say a bit more about this variability and its implications for the effects of the network variables? It’s possible that I’ve misunderstood something in this respect.

• Type of innovation: The authors’ 2022 paper lists distinct categories of neologisms on page 321, e.g. words related to new realities (‘fullstack’) vs. reinvigorated archaic forms (‘malaisante’). The current paper appears not to distinguish among these forms in the statistical analysis. I wonder if a sentence or two could be added about the potential differences among these categories.

Reviewer #3: Summary:

The study compares the diffusion of successful and failed lexical innovations and assesses the network determinants that can differentiate between successful and unsuccessful innovations. These network determinants include a combination of network centrality and position measures. Based on empirical evidence from social media, the authors claim similarity in the diffusion of both types of innovations when the innovations are new, in that the users peripheral to the network are the drivers of such changes. However, as the phases of diffusion progress, successful innovations differ from failed in that the successful innovations gain adoptions from the more central users in the network whereas the failed innovations do not benefit from such adoptions leading to their failure.

Overall, the paper presents empirical evidence for an interesting sociolinguistic problem but has some weaknesses in the methodology used to validate the claims. My perception is that the paper is not fully developed in terms of rigor, with some modifications and clarification, it would be ready for publication.

Strengths:

- The authors ground the empirical findings of their study in linguistic theories of the importance of network position and tie strength, though part of their claim about tie strength is not verified empirically.

- Additionally, the paper presents a comprehensive review of the existing sociolinguistic scholarship around the topic.

Weaknesses:

- The selection of the linguistic variables is not thoroughly described.

- The motivation of using the specific network measures deployed in the study is not sufficient.

- Some more inline explanation

How position in the network determines the fate of lexical innovations on Twitter

PCSY-D-24-00007R1

Dear Professor Chevrot,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'How position in the network determines the fate of lexical innovations on Twitter' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Complex Systems.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Complex Systems.

Best regards,

Jennifer Badham

Academic Editor

PLOS Complex Systems

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Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Complex Systems's publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Complex Systems does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I am pleased to confirm that all the revisions made to the manuscript titled "How position in the network determines the fate of lexical innovations on Twitter" have been thoroughly addressed to my satisfaction. The authors have successfully incorporated the suggested improvements, particularly in clarifying their methodology, enhancing the robustness of their data analysis, and providing a more comprehensive discussion of the results in the context of existing literature. The revised manuscript now presents a well-structured and compelling narrative that significantly contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of lexical innovation dissemination on social media platforms. Consequently, I am happy to endorse the manuscript for publication in its current form.

Reviewer #2: My concerns have mostly been addressed, and I believe the paper is ready for publication. One remaining question is the importance of the category of innovation, which is briefly discussed beginning at line 618. There are plenty of further questions to be asked here, but they can be seen as lying outside the paper's major goals. I would also add that the literature review gives the impression in some cases that the influence of social network factors on language is better known than it really is; for example, one simulation-based study is given as evidence that removing peripheral members from a network prevents innovation. In this domain, there are plenty more questions to be addressed in further work

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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