Lexical competition in the flankers task revisited

Aaron Vandendaele; Jonathan Grainger

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0285292

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 6, 2023
14 Mar 2023 Decision Letter - Yiu-Kei Tsang, Editor PONE-D-23-02898Lexical competition in the flankers task revisitedPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Vandendaele, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. We have received feedback from two independent reviewers, both of whom agree that the two experiments were well-designed and recommend publication with minor revisions. We invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised by the reviewers. The reviewers' feedback is clear and has been included below. I would like to draw your attention to a point made by Reviewer 2 regarding the random structure of the linear mixed-effects model (LMM). Instead of stating that "if the model structure allowed for it, the by-item and by-participant random random intercepts were included", it may be more direct to report which random effects were included in the final model (please also note that the word "random" was repeated, which may be a typo). 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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: I Don't Know ****** 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: Review of ms “Lexical competition in the flankers task revisited” This is a nice manuscript using the reading version of the flankers task (Dare & Shillcock, 2013) that examined lexical competition. The topic is interesting, the experiments have been competently conducted and analyzed, and the manuscript is easy to read. Thus, this is a strong candidate for publication. I have several suggestions from improvement: -It would be better to start the Introduction with a more general paragraph indicating the importance of the topic. The beginning of “In the present study we provide a further examination of the impact of orthographic relatedness across adjacent words within a sequence of words presented simultaneously and aligned horizontally” can be put in context. In this same paragraph, the parenthetical note “e.g., “The slight blue of the lights ...” => “The slight blur of the lights ...”, where the target word the word “blur” and the preview the word “blue”” seems to miss a couple of verbs (e.g. “where the target word is the word “blur” and the preview is the word “blue”). -Related to page 5, there is evidence when manipulating a word’s N in lexical decision vs. sentence reading: the same materials produce facilitation in lexical decision and inhibition in reading (including gaze durations, see Pollatsek et al., 1999), so some rewriting may be in order. -On page 9, I would update the reference to lme4. Also, I believe it’s more important to indicate the version of R (i.e., the core) than the version of RStudio. -On page 11, the “1 undefined” was actually “undefined” or rather “didn’t say”? -footnote 1: “the posterior distribution did not include 0”. I believe the authors wanted to say “the 95% credible interval of the posterior distribution did not include 0”. -In the General Discussion, the authors may want to spell out in more detail the implications of their study for the models of reading and word recognition. The manuscript ends a bit in an abrupt manner now. -Figure 2 does not reflect the actual timing of the flankers in the current experiments, so it needs to be slightly modified. -Table A1/A2. The values of R need to be with two decimal points (e.g., 1.30 would reflect a bad fit among the chains and this would still be “1”). So I am quite positive, most of the required work is on some careful rewriting and proofreading—I may have missed a few others. Reviewer #2: This paper reports two online experiments investigating task demands on the flanker effect during word identification. Participants made lexical decisions (Experiment 1) or identified target words (Experiment 2) in the presence of flanker words/bigrams. The results showed that related flanker words facilitated lexical decisions, replicating previous research. Related flanker words, however, were associated with increased errors in the perceptual identification task, whereas related bigrams yielded facilitation. I have a few queries that I would like the authors to address before recommending this paper for publication. - P. 5: I think it would be useful to elaborate a bit why it is argued that “the decision to move the eyes to the next word in a sequence” does not require unique word identification. The authors cite the E-Z Reader model to support this but, although that model assumes that the trigger to begin programming a saccade to the next word is the completion of a preliminary stage of word identification, it doesn’t seem accurate to imply that unique word identification does not occur in this model. - P. 8: Please clarify if the 2025 observations per condition were based on trials before or after the data exclusion procedures reported in the following section. - P. 9: It is stated that the LMM models only included subject and item random intercepts “if the model structure allowed for it”. Please elaborate on the model selection procedure. I would be surprised if the models failed to converge with random intercepts. Perhaps this is a typo – did you mean random slopes here? - The Experiment 2 data is analysed separately for the two sub experiments. Given that the targets were exactly the same in the two conditions, I think an analysis that combines the data and includes flanker type as a factor (and tests interactions with flanker relatedness) would be preferable. ****** 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: No ******** [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285292.r001
Revision 1
14 Apr 2023 Author Response Reviewer #1: Review of ms “Lexical competition in the flankers task revisited” This is a nice manuscript using the reading version of the flankers task (Dare & Shillcock, 2013) that examined lexical competition. The topic is interesting, the experiments have been competently conducted and analyzed, and the manuscript is easy to read. Thus, this is a strong candidate for publication. I have several suggestions from improvement: -It would be better to start the Introduction with a more general paragraph indicating the importance of the topic. The beginning of “In the present study we provide a further examination of the impact of orthographic relatedness across adjacent words within a sequence of words presented simultaneously and aligned horizontally” can be put in context. In this same paragraph, the parenthetical note “e.g., “The slight blue of the lights ...” => “The slight blur of the lights ...”, where the target word the word “blur” and the preview the word “blue”” seems to miss a couple of verbs (e.g. “where the target word is the word “blur” and the preview is the word “blue”). Response: We have added a new introductory paragraph in order to provide a better context for the present work, and we have corrected the parenthetical note – thanks for pointing out this error. Moreover, when re-writing this section, we discovered that we had not done a good job in describing the different paradigms, so what was the initial paragraph of the manuscript has been re-written, and the part concerning parafoveal-previews has been simplified and moved to the new introductory paragraph. -Related to page 5, there is evidence when manipulating a word’s N in lexical decision vs. sentence reading: the same materials produce facilitation in lexical decision and inhibition in reading (including gaze durations, see Pollatsek et al., 1999), so some rewriting may be in order. Response: We now cite Pollatsek et al. in the new introductory paragraph, and we now refer to this work when discussing possible differences between lexical decision and sentence reading (see new footnote 1). -On page 9, I would update the reference to lme4. Also, I believe it’s more important to indicate the version of R (i.e., the core) than the version of RStudio. Response: we now cite the correct version of R. We cite the lme4 package as it is referred to in the repository (i.e., https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/citation.html). We could not find a more recent version for the reference, but we now mention the version of lme4 which we used for the analyses. -On page 11, the “1 undefined” was actually “undefined” or rather “didn’t say”? Response: This refers to the option ‘other/undefined’ given to participants when asked to indicate their gender. We have better specified this in the revision. -footnote 1: “the posterior distribution did not include 0”. I believe the authors wanted to say “the 95% credible interval of the posterior distribution did not include 0”. Response: That is correct, we have now corrected this in the footnote. -In the General Discussion, the authors may want to spell out in more detail the implications of their study for the models of reading and word recognition. The manuscript ends a bit in an abrupt manner now. Response: We have added a new paragraph at the end of the General Discussion that summarizes the findings and points to their implications for models of word recognition and reading. -Figure 2 does not reflect the actual timing of the flankers in the current experiments, so it needs to be slightly modified. Response: We apologize for this error. The figure has now been modified to display the correct timing. -Table A1/A2. The values of R need to be with two decimal points (e.g., 1.30 would reflect a bad fit among the chains and this would still be “1”). Response: The Rhat (R^) convergence statistic is now reported up to two decimal points. So I am quite positive, most of the required work is on some careful rewriting and proofreading—I may have missed a few others. Response: Many thanks for your positive evaluation of this work. We have done the careful proofreading that you requested, and we hope that all is in order now. Reviewer #2: This paper reports two online experiments investigating task demands on the flanker effect during word identification. Participants made lexical decisions (Experiment 1) or identified target words (Experiment 2) in the presence of flanker words/bigrams. The results showed that related flanker words facilitated lexical decisions, replicating previous research. Related flanker words, however, were associated with increased errors in the perceptual identification task, whereas related bigrams yielded facilitation. I have a few queries that I would like the authors to address before recommending this paper for publication. - P. 5: I think it would be useful to elaborate a bit why it is argued that “the decision to move the eyes to the next word in a sequence” does not require unique word identification. The authors cite the E-Z Reader model to support this but, although that model assumes that the trigger to begin programming a saccade to the next word is the completion of a preliminary stage of word identification, it doesn’t seem accurate to imply that unique word identification does not occur in this model. Response: We have now clarified this point. It is the fact that in EZ-Reader it is the familiarity check and not word identification that triggers the decision to move the eyes to the next work that is crucial for our arguments. We have clarified this point. - P. 8: Please clarify if the 2025 observations per condition were based on trials before or after the data exclusion procedures reported in the following section. Response: This number of observations per condition is before data exclusion procedures. We did not apply an adaptive testing procedure to guarantee enough observations per condition. Rather, we based ourselves on data from previous studies which used a similar experiment setup. We estimated a margin of 20%, meaning 2000 observations was our preset goal. After all exclusion procedures, we ended up with 1601 observations in the orthographically related flanker condition and 1474 in the control flanker condition. We now mention this in the paper. - P. 9: It is stated that the LMM models only included subject and item random intercepts “if the model structure allowed for it”. Please elaborate on the model selection procedure. I would be surprised if the models failed to converge with random intercepts. Perhaps this is a typo – did you mean random slopes here? Response: This was indeed a typo. To clarify this, we now specify the model selection procedure. Next to that, the final model for each analysis has been written out. - The Experiment 2 data is analysed separately for the two sub experiments. Given that the targets were exactly the same in the two conditions, I think an analysis that combines the data and includes flanker type as a factor (and tests interactions with flanker relatedness) would be preferable. Response: We now present the analysis of Experiment 2 as recommended by this reviewer. We obtain the same pattern of results, but with the addition of a significant interaction effect between type of flanker and flanker relatedness. This significant interaction allows us to examine, as we did before, the effects of flanker relatedness separately for the word and bigram flankers. We have also included a new figure (Figure 3) that provides an overview of these results and that highlights the significant interaction. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285292.r002
19 Apr 2023 Decision Letter - Yiu-Kei Tsang, Editor Lexical competition in the flankers task revisited PONE-D-23-02898R1 Dear Dr. Vandendaele, 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, Yiu-Kei Tsang Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285292.r003
Formally Accepted
19 May 2023 Acceptance Letter - Yiu-Kei Tsang, Editor PONE-D-23-02898R1 Lexical competition in the flankers task revisited Dear Dr. Vandendaele: 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. Yiu-Kei Tsang Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285292.r004

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