PONE-D-22-09945Lasting Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Language ProcessingPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Ostrand,

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.

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Congratulations on a great paper!! As you will see, one of the reviewers has recommended that we accept the manuscript as is and the other reviewer only has very minor comments. I ask that you address those as you see fit. I will not send out your revised manuscript for another round of reviews.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

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Stephanie Ries-Cornou, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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: The manuscript reports a clever set of experiments testing whether the change in frequency for pandemic related words changed their processing. Using a phonemic restoration task, the results showed a bias to hear ambiguous stimuli as Covid related words rather than pre-Covid frequency matched control words. In addition, using a cough instead of grey noise for the word interruption further increased the bias for Covid related words. The results demonstrated processing consequences of recent frequency increases and changes in semantic priming patterns.

The results are unsurprising. However, the circumstances for collecting the data are novel and the results confirm that one sees these expected effects under these novel conditions.The comparison of a cough intrusion with a noise one to test for priming is inspired. The methodology and analyses are solid. The writing is unusually clear and concise. I strongly recommend this manuscript for publication. No changes needed.

Reviewer #2: First off, this paper was generally very easy to read!

Next, some thoughts from a phonetician: fricatives and voiceless stops have real noise components, and I would have expected that this would make listeners more likely to restore towards "task" than towards "mask." I'm not intimately familiar enough with the phoneme restoration literature to know whether this effect has been documented or not. Either way, this is of course not a confound for your effect in cases like mask/task, quite the opposite, and strengthens the case that a phonetic phenomenon is not responsible for the higher proportion of COVID target restorations. Just something to think about and comment on, if you wanted to.

I appreciate that all the data and materials are available at the additional link, but I think it would be nice to have a clearer explanation of how experiments 1 and 2 differed from each other in the text, and also to have a stimuli table.

I'd like to know how many minutes the study typically lasted if participants were only paid $2.50. It's important to be transparent about how we treat participants.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Lasting Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Language Processing

PONE-D-22-09945R1

Dear Dr. Ostrand,

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,

Stephanie Ries-Cornou, Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: