PONE-D-20-14424

Category priming promotes infants’ success in imagining and naming things unseen

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Luchkina,

First of all, thanks for your patience waiting for this decision. As I mentioned in a previous email, it was a challenge to find reviewers during this challenging time, and the timing of when those reviews came in delayed my decision.  After careful consideration, we feel that it your submission merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’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.

I think this is an interesting proposal, and with some additional details and shifts in framing, as well as some possible modifications of some of the methodological details, could make a nice contribution to the literature on word learning. I won't go into detail with regard to the reviewers' comments, but let me highlight a few key points that I want to make sure you pay particular attention to:

1) Both reviewers thought that the theoretical motivation for these studies needed to be fleshed out, and had suggestions for how to do so. Reviewer 2 in particular was unclear what question this was asking that was distinct from prior work on word learning and learning about absent referents, and suggested that the work needed to be more clearly situated in the word learning literature. 

2) Both reviewers had some concerns about specific aspects of the methodology, including sample size, the possible need for an additional control condition, and more details about and justifications for specific methodological decisions.

3) Reviewer 2 notes, and I agree, that you may need to discuss how data collection will be impacted by the current pandemic. Is the plan to wait until after the pandemic subsides (which could be a long time), or are there plans for virtual data collection, in which case is there evidence that this will work with infants of this age? 

Please also be sure to read each review closely, as my above summary is by no means an exhaustive list of the recommended changes. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 29 2020 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 plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ 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,

Lucas Payne Butler

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 ONE 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 and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This is a well written manuscript, with clear hypothesis. The design is clever, thorough and deals with potential confounds, thus allowing a straightforward validation of hypothesis. However, some additional clarifications are required and some additional confounds addressed.

The intro should discuss evidence for superordinate category knowledge in the second year of life. Your experiment depends on children being able to recognise a new fruit as belonging to the fruit category, for example. More detail needed also on the prerequisites for the semantic priming - The study you cite in support of such an ability (19) only shows that younger infants have broader categories, e.g. foot includes socks - it is not a study suggesting semantic priming. The developmental change described in that study might suggest that 15 mo do not even benefit from this over-generalization. Also, is priming sufficient, do infants not also need to make a pragmatic inference - that since the experimenter choose to name 3 fruits, the fourth must be from the same superordinate category? This is quite a peculiar inference which also needs to be backed up with some theoretical or empiric support from the literature. You preliminary study shows evidence that either semantic priming or pragmatic inferences do work in 15mo, so what is needed is some stronger apriori motivation of why it might be so.

Please provide power analysis for your sample - how many participants are needed to reach significance for both the main effect of Condition and the follow-up tests, for the expected (or medium) effect size. Please ensure that recruitment takes into account drop-out rate, thus ensuring that the final sample size is that expected from power analysis. Also, indicate the follow-up tests and any multiple correction applied, as part of your analysis.

Follow-up control condition - Looking towards the target after the first prompt is not strong evidence that they have not associated the word with the target - participants may make the pragmatic choice of looking at the category that the person engaged with previously. A better test would be to use a completely novel word in test.

Experiment 2- related to the comment above, if the training is aimed at teaching superordinate category knowledge, will labeling basic level categories achieve that ? If it is assumed 12 mo possess the superordinate categories, do they need to know the basic level labels in order to succeed at the task ?

Reviewer #2: Discussion of Theoretical Framing of the Research Question

Overall this is a well written proposal. I have several concerns related to the framing of the study and the specific research question.

The introduction starts by stating that (1) calling to mind referents in their absence is a crucial feature of human language, (2) this ability is enabled by an understanding of the referential understanding of words, and (3) the developmental origin of this referential understanding is not clear.

The authors then discuss some literature on bootstrapping on word meaning from syntax, and state that 15-month-olds fail to use syntax as a cue to a word’s meaning and pose the question of whether 15-month-olds have the conceptual and linguistic knowledge to learn words from language alone. Their study is aimed to answer this question.

I found this set-up of the study questions very confusing for the following reasons:

1. There is plenty of evidence in the word learning literature that infants have an understanding of the referential nature of labels by 15-months. For example, work by Bergelson and Swingley shows that 6-9 month olds have a fairly abstract representation of labels; several studies by Ganea and Saylor show that 12-15 month-olds respond to labels in a displaced reference context; Ganea, Fitch, Harris and Kaldy (2016) show that even 15-month-olds can update expectations about the visual word on the basis of language alone; and, directly relevant to this study’s goals, a recent study by Osina, Saylor, and Ganea (2018) indicates that infants as young as 16-months use category label knowledge to interpret absent reference. Also, the findings of Gliga and Csibra (2009) indicate that infants expect to find an objects based on a novel label coupled with a deictic gesture. Given this body of work (this is only a small selection of it) showing that infants have a referential understanding of language by 15 months, as shown by their ability to process labels in the absence of their referents and their ability to access categorical knowledge when hearing a label, it is not clear to me what the authors define as “referential understanding.” The authors need to state explicitly why these other ways of testing referential understanding do not provide sufficient evidence and in what way their study is advancing what we already know about infants’ referential understanding.

2. The study should be better situated in the word learning literature. It is not clear to me why the work on syntactical bootstrapping is included. This study is not using syntax but conceptual knowledge of a category to see whether children can infer meaning. Therefore a a review of the literature on the taxonomic bias on word learning needs to be included, rather than of the syntactical bootstrapping literature.

Given the above considerations, it was difficult to fully comprehend the exact research questions. It seems like the goal is to test whether toddlers establish a referent when they hear something even if they do not see the object, when it is taxonomically related to previous objects in the task. The novelty seems to be that a specific referent (using a novel not familiar word) can be recalled when the category is primed. What is the nature of children’s expectations of what a novel word means? Can children learn words in the absence of information, and does the same taxonomic bias occur without visual information?

Discussion of the Design

- For the condition effects, there were only predictions for referential understanding when toddlers were primed by category. There should also be expectations for the no category priming condition (the basis for this expectation also needs to be supported by the literature and then cited accordingly).

- Since the goal of the proposed research is to test the influence of conceptual priming on infants’ referential understanding, the perceptual cues should be minimized/held constant within and across conditions. Some perceptual features of the current stimuli might be potential confounding variable in the proposed study. For example, in the first trial of the Category-priming condition, the novel fruit is both conceptually and perceptually similar to the preceding set of stimuli while the non-target item (furniture) is both conceptually and perceptually distinct. An out-of-category item which perceptually looks more similar to the target category would work better.

- Decisions for how the question for the control condition was selected need to explained. Why and how they help address the research question.

- Why 6 seconds? Explain why this amount of time was selected and if there is research to suggest that this is the norm. Also, the exclusion criteria for the looking data needs to be clear. What is the threshold criteria to be included for each trial, and how was this decided.

- Explain the sample size – power analysis

- Why did the authors select this type of design as opposed to a within-subjects design? They could use 2 trials per condition instead of 4 – increases the power.

- What will the authors do with the information collected from the demographic questionnaire? Will they link any of the data to the study’s DVs?

- The timeline for data collection may need to be adjusted given COVID situation.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Teodora Gliga

Reviewer #2: No

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Semantic priming supports infants’ ability to learn names of unseen objects

PONE-D-20-14424R1

Dear Dr. Luchkina,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Lucas Payne Butler

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions?

The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses?

The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable?

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 #2: Yes

**********

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

PLOS ONE 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 #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics.

You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study.

(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: The authors have responded to all my suggestions. I look forward to seeing the results. Upon writing the paper I suggest the authors also cite this relevant work:

Saylor, M. M., Osina, M., Tassin, T., Rose, R., & Ganea, P. A. (2016). Creature feature: preschoolers use verbal descriptions to identify referents. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.07.005

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No