Non-nutritive suck and voice onset time: Examining infant oromotor coordination

Elizabeth Heller Murray; Joanna Lewis; Emily Zimmerman

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0250529

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJanuary 26, 2021
22 Mar 2021 Decision Letter - Michael Döllinger, Editor PONE-D-21-02855 Non-nutritive suck and voice onset time: Examining infant oromotor coordination PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Zimmerman, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by April 1. 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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The signed consent form should not be submitted with the manuscript, but should be securely filed in the individual's case notes. Please amend the methods section and ethics statement of the manuscript to explicitly state that the patient/participant has provided consent for publication: “The individual in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish these case details”. If you are unable to obtain consent from the subject of the photograph, you will need to remove the figure and any other textual identifying information or case descriptions for this individual. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). 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: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. 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 ****** 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: Nicely designed and completed study that is clearly described. Please consider these few minor points: 1) It would help readers to depict the various measures as part of Fig 1 (or in addition to fig 1). 2) On line 205, the CoV is assigned units (ms). Isn't it a ratio and unit-less? 3) Please describe the consonants - are these consonant-like sounds or would they perceived as actual consonants? Do they generally sound voiced or a mix of voiced and voiceless? Are they primarily reduplicated babbled syllable trains? 4) Discussion - lines 257-260: it sounds as if you're suggesting this is causal (with the sucking, they are building the frame needed for increased babbling). You might want to acknowledge that they might both be consequences of the same underlying process / skill / advantage. 5) I didn't see the NNS individual data at the level I think PLOS requests. Perhaps it is in an appendix that I missed. Reviewer #2: Thankyou for giving me the opportunity to review this very well written manuscript. It was a pleasure to review. The manuscript presents the results of a very challenging study comparing the activity of non nutritive sucking in infants at 3 months and the variability of voice onset time in babbling in the same infants at age 12 months. The authors are to be congratulated for achieving difficult data collection. All aspects of the study appear to have been well conducted with good scientific rigour. I have only a few comments that I think the authors should consider. The stop consonants (if determinable) that VOT was calculated on is not reported. Given that VOT varies across phonemes, it is important that these be identified and categorised if possible and then VOT values in each phoneme group be compared to child values reported in the literature to assess if the infants variability is consistent with phoneme variability ranges. I would be interested to see if any of the NNS measures were more or less correlated with different phonemes. If this is not possible, the authors should provided more detail regarding whether a phoneme target is identifiable or not. Interpretation of the results seem appropriate regarding the movement of jaw and tongue between NNS and VOT in babbling. The authors fail, however, to discuss movement of the vocal folds, and the relationship or not of vocal fold movement to jaw and tongue movement. This is a problematic as VOT is a measure of co-ordination of movements of jaw and tongue vocal fold closure with closure and vibration of the vocal folds. They should mention how the onset of phonation may be affected by the articulatory movements common to NNS and VOT. Some comment on vocal fold activity or posture in NNS should also be mentioned for context. Thankyou again for the opportunity to review this manuscript. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). 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Revision 1
27 Mar 2021 Author Response We would like to thank both the reviewers and the editor for this review of our article Non-Nutritive Suck and Voice Onset Time: Examining Infant Oromotor Coordination. We have addressed each point below and have highlighted the changes in the ‘Revised Manuscript with Track Changes’ document. We are grateful for the time and effort put into these reviews and believe that these changes make the manuscript stronger. Thank you for the opportunity to resubmit. 1. A minimally anonymized data set with subject-level data for voice onset time and non-nutritive suck variables has been made public through the open science framework platform available here: https://osf.io/f2sk7/ 2. We have updated the methods to explicitly say “The parent of the infant pictured in this manuscript has given written informed consent (as outlined in PLOS consent form) to publish these case details.” We have added this information in our ethics statement and have saved a copy of this form securely in the individual’s case notes. 3. In re-checking all of our analyses prior to uploading the final anonymized dataset, we realized we had reported numbers that were not the final analysis. These resulted in very minor changes to the variables reported in the text and figure 4. These minor corrections did not change the outcomes of the statistical tests. We have highlighted these changes in the manuscript and apologize for this oversight. Below are the responses to the individual reviewer comments. Reviewer #1: 1. Nicely designed and completed study that is clearly described. Please consider these few minor points Response: Thank you for your review. 2. It would help readers to depict the various measures as part of Fig 1 (or in addition to fig 1). Response: We have added additional text to the figure caption to explain these measures in more detail. 3. On line 205, the CoV is assigned units (ms). Isn't it a ratio and unit-less? Response: Thank you for noticing this oversight. You are correct CoV is unitless and we have updated the text. 4. Please describe the consonants - are these consonant-like sounds or would they perceived as actual consonants? Do they generally sound voiced or a mix of voiced and voiceless? Are they primarily reduplicated babbled syllable trains? Response: Thank you for this excellent point. We have added additional text in the methods and discussion to address this comment. The consonants were analyzed were from single syllable productions, or instances of reduplicated or variegated babbling. No identifiable words with stop consonants were found in these recordings. We have also added a table detailing the consonants preliminarily identified during the initial VOT analysis. 5. Discussion - lines 257-260: it sounds as if you're suggesting this is causal (with the sucking, they are building the frame needed for increased babbling). You might want to acknowledge that they might both be consequences of the same underlying process / skill / advantage. Response: Thank you for this note – we agree this important to acknowledge. We have updated the discussion to include an acknowledgement that these could be the same process developing. 6. I didn't see the NNS individual data at the level I think PLOS requests. Perhaps it is in an appendix that I missed. Response: Thank you for pointing this out. We have added the individual data to an ‘open science framework’ data repository https://osf.io/f2sk7/ Reviewer #2: 1. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this very well written manuscript. It was a pleasure to review. The manuscript presents the results of a very challenging study comparing the activity of non nutritive sucking in infants at 3 months and the variability of voice onset time in babbling in the same infants at age 12 months. The authors are to be congratulated for achieving difficult data collection. Response: Thank you for your review. 2. The stop consonants (if determinable) that VOT was calculated on is not reported. Given that VOT varies across phonemes, it is important that these be identified and categorized if possible and then VOT values in each phoneme group be compared to child values reported in the literature to assess if the infants variability is consistent with phoneme variability ranges. I would be interested to see if any of the NNS measures were more or less correlated with different phonemes. If this is not possible, the authors should provided more detail regarding whether a phoneme target is identifiable or not Response: Thank you for this excellent point. We have also added a table detailing the consonants preliminarily identified during the initial VOT analysis and added text in the discussion. Although we agree that analyzing the relationship between NNS measures is a very interesting idea, we are hesitant to do this in the current paper due to the sample size and the subjective nature of consonant productions in babbling. We have added text to addressed this directly in the discussion and to highlight the importance of doing this in future work. 3. Interpretation of the results seem appropriate regarding the movement of jaw and tongue between NNS and VOT in babbling. The authors fail, however, to discuss movement of the vocal folds, and the relationship or not of vocal fold movement to jaw and tongue movement. This is a problematic as VOT is a measure of co-ordination of movements of jaw and tongue vocal fold closure with closure and vibration of the vocal folds. They should mention how the onset of phonation may be affected by the articulatory movements common to NNS and VOT. Some comment on vocal fold activity or posture in NNS should also be mentioned for context. Response: Thank you for this comment. We agree that not speaking about vocal fold motion was an oversight and we have now added additional text in the discussion. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ResponseToReviews.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250529.r002
8 Apr 2021 Decision Letter - Michael Döllinger, Editor Non-nutritive suck and voice onset time: Examining infant oromotor coordination PONE-D-21-02855R1 Dear Dr. Zimmerman, 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. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Michael Döllinger, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Dear authors, I recommend acceptance, However, please check on following rather small errors: line 224: "1.190" or "11.90"; if "1.190" is correct, please change to "1.19" Line 389: please provide pages line458: "2012;2012" twice? correct? line472: please provide pages reference 50: If this is a book, than there is information missing, i guess. Figure 3: units of x-axis are missin, I guess it is ms Figure4: units for x-y-axes? https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250529.r003
Formally Accepted
13 Apr 2021 Acceptance Letter - Michael Döllinger, Editor PONE-D-21-02855R1 Non-nutritive suck and voice onset time: Examining infant oromotor coordination Dear Dr. Zimmerman: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Michael Döllinger Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250529.r004

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