Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification

Jessica Nieder; Fabian Tomaschek

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0284534

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJanuary 25, 2023
10 Feb 2023 Decision Letter - Simon Grima, Editor PONE-D-23-02200Maltese as a Merger of Two Worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classificationPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Nieder, 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 Mar 27 2023 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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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Additional Editor Comments: Maltese as a Merger of Two Worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification Abstract 1. The author has picked a unique topic, "PHONOTACTICS”, which is an area of phonology concerned with the analysis and description of the permitted sound sequences of a language and is the main focus of this paper. According to the abstract, the novelty lies only in using computational methods compared to hands-on comparative methods. Please clarify this novelty part. 2. “Moreover, 16 we find that the classification depends on whether a noun forms a sound or broken plural.” Please correct this line. 3. What are the findings not mentioned in the abstract? 4. In my opinion, Phonotactics refers to the principles according to which languages allow sound combinations and segment sequencing; I did not see any challenges related to Phonotactics have to do with the universal versus language-specific nature of phonotactic rules and preferences. Were there any? I didn't find any such review even on the same 5. Please focus on the research gap in the introduction. Strengthen the argument of your study by referring to a larger body of scientific literature, and clearly outline what is missing in the literature and what gap you wish to fill in. [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: Yes 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: Thank you for opportunity this paper, very interesting for me. The paper provides empirical evidence for the status of Maltese as being a language with an intertwined morphological system as a result of extensive language contact, also serve as a base for future cross-language modelling studies. Clearly, Maltese represents a test case in which the typological origin of word forms is very well defined. Reviewer #2: Maltese as a Merger of Two Worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification Abstract 1. The author has picked a unique topic, "PHONOTACTICS”, which is an area of phonology concerned with the analysis and description of the permitted sound sequences of a language and is the main focus of this paper. According to the abstract, the novelty lies only in using computational methods compared to hands-on comparative methods. Please clarify this novelty part. 2. “Moreover, 16 we find that the classification depends on whether a noun forms a sound or broken plural.” Please correct this line. 3. What are the findings not mentioned in the abstract? 4. In my opinion, Phonotactics refers to the principles according to which languages allow sound combinations and segment sequencing; I did not see any challenges related to Phonotactics have to do with the universal versus language-specific nature of phonotactic rules and preferences. Were there any? I didn't find any such review even on the same 5. Please focus on the research gap in the introduction. Strengthen the argument of your study by referring to a larger body of scientific literature, and clearly outline what is missing in the literature and what gap you wish to fill in. ****** 6. 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 #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes: KIRAN SOOD ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.<quillbot-extension-portal></quillbot-extension-portal> https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284534.r001
Revision 1
3 Mar 2023 Author Response 1. The author has picked a unique topic, “PHONOTACTICS”, which is an area of phonology concerned with the analysis and description of the permitted sound sequences of a language and is the main focus of this paper. According to the abstract, the novelty lies only in using computational methods compared to hands-on comparative methods. Please clarify this novelty part. Response: We have made this aspect of our paper stronger in the abstract and in the introduction of this paper. This is the new abstract: “Maltese is a prime example of a language that emerged through extensive language contact, joining the two linguistic worlds of Semitic and Italo-Romance languages. Previous studies have shown this shared origin on the basis of hands-on comparative methods. However, such approaches may be biased by the researchers perspective and the selected material. To avoid this bias, we employed a naive computational method that classifies words on the basis of their phonotactics. Specifically, we trained a simple two-layer neural network on Tunisian and Italian nouns, i.e. the languages that Maltese emerged from. We used the trained network to classify Maltese nouns based on their phonotactic characteristics as either of Tunisian or of Italian origin. Overall, the network is capable of correctly classifying Maltese nouns as belonging to either of the original languages. Moreover, we find that the classification depends on whether a noun has a sound or broken plural. Moreover, by manipulating the segment identity in the training input, we found that consonants are more important for the classification of Maltese nouns than vowels. While our results replicate previous comparative studies, they also demonstrate that a more fine grained classification of a language’s origin can be based on individual words and morphological classes.” This is on page 2 of the new manuscript: “In doing so, we employ a less biased method for the comparison of Maltese with 25 Semitic and Italo-Romance languages and simultaneously increase the amount of data 26 investigated. Accordingly, our study introduces a computational method based on 27 phonotactic classification to the study of the origin of Maltese. ” 2. “Moreover, 16 we find that the classification depends on whether a noun forms a sound or broken plural.” Please correct this line. Response: We replaced “whether a noun forms ...” with “whether a noun has...”. 3. What are the findings not mentioned in the abstract? Response: We think that the reviewer is referring to our analysis concerning the informativity of vowels and consonants at this point. We have therefore added a sentence mentioning these results.This is the new abstract: “Maltese is a prime example of a language that emerged through extensive language contact, joining the two linguistic worlds of Semitic and Italo-Romance languages. Previous studies have shown this shared origin on the basis of hands-on comparative methods. However, such approaches may be biased by the researchers perspective and the selected material. To avoid this bias, we employed a naive computational method that classifies words on the basis of their phonotactics. Specifically, we trained a simple two-layer neural network on Tunisian and Italian nouns, i.e. the languages that Maltese emerged from. We used the trained network to classify Maltese nouns based on their phonotactic characteristics as either of Tunisian or of Italian origin. Overall, the network is capable of correctly classifying Maltese nouns as belonging to either of the original languages. Moreover, we find that the classification depends on whether a noun has a sound or broken plural. Moreover, by manipulating the segment identity in the training input, we found that consonants are more important for the classification of Maltese nouns than vowels. While our results replicate previous comparative studies, they also demonstrate that a more fine grained classification of a language’s origin can be based on individual words and morphological classes.” 4. In my opinion, Phonotactics refers to the principles according to which languages allow sound combinations and segment sequencing; I did not see any challenges related to Phonotactics have to do with the universal versus language-specific nature of phonotactic rules and preferences. Were there any? I didn’t find any such review even on the same Response: We absolutely agree with the reviewer’s statement here that phonotactics refers to language specific combinations and sequences of sounds. However, we never intended to investigate to what degree phonotactics may be universal or language specific. Quite the contrary. In our study, we exploited the language specific distribution of sounds and sound sequences to have Maltese nouns classified as either Semitic or Non-Semitic. As we have repeatedly stated in our manuscript, our model learned the phonotactics of Tunisian and Italian during the training and was able to predict the origin of Maltese nouns based on their phonotactic characteristics. To make the role of phonotactics more clear, we slightly changed the text of our research hypothesis and added “phonotactic classification” in the following paragraph on page 4 of the new manuscript: “RH: A neural network trained to classify Tunisian Arabic and Italian word forms as 128 either Semitic or Italo-Romance based on the words’ phonotactics should also be 129 able to classify Maltese nouns that originate from Tunisian Arabic as Semitic and 130 Maltese nouns that originate from Italian as Non-Semitic.” “We will investigate to what degree the phonotactic classification of Maltese nouns as 132 Semitic or Non-Semitic depends on their origin.” 5. Please focus on the research gap in the introduction. Strengthen the argument of your study by referring to a larger body of scientific literature, and clearly outline what is missing in the literature and what gap you wish to fill in. Response: Maltese is still a rather underresearched language, which is why the number of studies about this topic is relatively small. This is why, in our humble opinion, we think we have referenced all the relevant studies on Maltese comparatistic linguistics in our manuscript, the most important one being Comrie 2009. Concerning the studies on employing computational methods to compare languages, again, to our knowledge, since this is a relatively new scientific field, there are only a few studies that have employed this technique. We have mentioned those studies that have motivated us to perform the present study on Maltese such as Jäger 2015, Jäger & Wichmann 2016, Jäger et al. 2017, Jäger & List 2018 and List 2022. To our knowledge, the model that we are applying has not been used before for a cross-language modelling procedure within a language. That is why our study could also be described as being a contribution to this new scientific field. Regarding the usage of the model for Maltese, we cited the two relevant papers employing this technique for Maltese noun inflections (Nieder et al. 2021, 2022). However, if the reviewer is able to point us to any studies they think are also highly relevant for the present paper, we are of course happy to include them in our manuscript. In addition, we have included the following sentence to our introduction to make the missing gap more apparent: ”In doing so, we employ a less biased method for the comparison of Maltese with Semitic and Italo-Romance languages and simultaneously increase the amount of data employed. Accordingly, our study introduces a computational method based on phonotactics to the study of the origin of Maltese.” https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284534.r002
3 Apr 2023 Decision Letter - Simon Grima, Editor Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification PONE-D-23-02200R1 Dear Dr. Nieder, 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, Simon Grima, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: <quillbot-extension-portal></quillbot-extension-portal> https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284534.r003
Formally Accepted
6 Apr 2023 Acceptance Letter - Simon Grima, Editor PONE-D-23-02200R1 Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification Dear Dr. Nieder: 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 Professor Simon Grima Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284534.r004

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