Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic

Sarah Dolscheid; Judith Schlenter; Martina Penke

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0298659

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 16, 2023
2 Nov 2023 Decision Letter - Montserrat Comesaña Vila, Editor PONE-D-23-25451Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and ArabicPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Dolscheid, Thank you for submitting your manuscript ID PONE-D-23-25451 entitled "Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic" to Plos One. Your manuscript has been reviewed by two expert reviewers and by myself. The comments of the reviewers are included at the bottom of this letter. You will see that both reviewers are positive and provide feedback on how the paper can be improved; The Reviewer 2 considers that since no power analysis was conducted a-priori, you should present the power achieved for the critical comparisons. The Reviewer 1 and I showed concern over the same issue. The number of different items to address are few, and thus they should be doable and will lead to a clearer and more robust paper. Please submit a new version of the manuscript by Dec 17 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Montserrat Comesaña Vila Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. 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. Note from Emily Chenette, Editor in Chief of PLOS ONE, and Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director of Open Research Solutions at PLOS: Did you know that depositing data in a repository is associated with up to a 25% citation advantage (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416)? If you’ve not already done so, consider depositing your raw data in a repository to ensure your work is read, appreciated and cited by the largest possible audience. You’ll also earn an Accessible Data icon on your published paper if you deposit your data in any participating repository (https://plos.org/open-science/open-data/#accessible-data). 3. We note that Figures 1 and 4 in your submission contain copyrighted images. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright. We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission: 1. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figures 1 and 4 to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license. We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text: “I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.” Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an "Other" file with your submission. In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].” 2. If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only. 4. 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. [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: The MS PONE-D-23-25451 entitled “Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German” presents the results of two experiments aimed to assess the influence of animacy on language processing, in particular on conjoined noun phrases. In the first experiment, data were collected from German and Arabic adult speakers. The results revealed a supremacy of reading and writing habits over any possible effect of animacy on language processing. In the second experiment, preschool children with no engrained habits of reading or writing were tested. Children “preferred to start their utterances with the animate entity regardless of position”, thus showing an animacy bias. Additional analyses were further conducted to explore the extent to which the amount of exposure to German influenced the Arabic adult participants’ responses. Exploratory analyses were also conducted regarding children’s writing experience. The conclusions were generally consistent with the predictions. The MS is well-written, the experiments were designed carefully and efforts were made to ensure the procedure would be sensitive to the manipulation being implemented (e.g., some characteristics were equated between the animate and inanimate stimuli). The predictions are also clear in light of the presented literature and the discussion considers the related literature. I applaud the authors for making their materials, data, and R codes available to the scientific community. I should note that the link provided in the “statistical analyses” section of the Manuscript leads to the “Materials” section on OSF. A clear note should also be made in the Manuscript on the fact that the materials are also made available. I only have a few comments for the authors to consider. At the end of the Introduction, the authors start by presenting their predictions and briefly describe the procedure. Then they have a section named ” The current study”. The first content could be integrated into such a section, thus avoiding some repetition of information that is occurring between these two parts; this would also make the reading more fluent and integrated. Participants: some justification needs to be provided regarding the sample size in both experiments. Experiment 1- “A separate logistic regression model conducted for the German group revealed no significant intercept (i.e., no effect of ‘animacy’, Est. = 0.20, SE = 0.37, z = 0.53, p = 0.60) but a significant effect of ‘position’ (Est. = 7.67, SE = 0.57, z = 13.56, p < 0.001), indicating that the German group was more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was located on the left than when it was located on the right.”- the conclusion of this sentence does not seem consistent with the data nor with the remaining conclusions and discussion. Main Discussion: the ideas on page 33 regarding the effect of exposure of Arabic speakers to German are someone repeated. Please consider revising. Another element that might be compromising a stronger effect of animacy in children derives from the fact that a lot of common objects are presented as animates in children’s programs. For example, a sponge becomes “Sponge Bob”, cars become animates (e.g., Lightning Mcqueen, Mater, and so on), a train becomes “Thomas the Tank Engine” and all his companions, Dora the Explorer's Backpack, and many others. Thus, the clear differentiation between animates and inanimates may become somewhat “unclear” with such experiences. MINOR ASPECTS • “mean age: 4;11 years, range: 3;8 to 5;11 years).” – the ; should be , • “statistical analyses” is used in Exp 1 whereas “statistical results” is used in Exp 2 to refer to the same type of content. Reviewer #2: The study is straightforward, the method simple and the data are adequately analyzed. The manuscript is well written but lengthy in view of its theoretical contribution. I would recommend shortening the text to help speed up the reading. I think that careful editing may potentially achieve a reduction of 20% of the length of the introduciton adn discussion. One limitation of the present study is a choice of method affording one measure. More specifically, response latencies were not measured, which may have provided additional useful information (e.g., the comparison of RTs between the German group and those participants from the Arabic group who showed a left-to-right preference could provide evidence of a possible cognitive cost in the latter). This is not a major issue, however. The authors do not appear to have based their sample on an a-priori power analysis. Low-powered studies incur a higher risk of false significant effects. The authors should justify their sample size and, since no power analysis was conducted a-priori, present the power achieved for the critical comparisons. For example, in Experiment 1, what was the power achieved given the sample size, Type I error of .05, and the effect size of the group x position of the animate noun interaction? From a theoretical perspective, the study does not appear to make any important contribution. Are the results of relevance for theoretical models? What would be these implications? Can anything be said about the relative weight of animacy and reading/production habits? What could be the roles of reading vs language production in shaping the effects reported here? ****** 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.0298659.r001
Revision 1
8 Jan 2024 Author Response Comments: Editor: You will see that both reviewers are positive and provide feedback on how the paper can be improved; The Reviewer 2 considers that since no power analysis was conducted a-priori, you should present the power achieved for the critical comparisons. The Reviewer 1 and I showed concern over the same issue. We thank the editor and the reviewers for highlighting the merits of our study. We now provide power analyses and present the power achieved for the critical comparisons. Since both reviewers noted that the paper was too long and would benefit from editing, we present the results of the power analyses in the supplementary materials. The code and the detailed results can be found on OSF. Given the high power that was achieved for the critical effects, we can be quite confident that our study was not underpowered and that the selected sample size was appropriate. Reviewer #1: The MS is well-written, the experiments were designed carefully and efforts were made to ensure the procedure would be sensitive to the manipulation being implemented (e.g., some characteristics were equated between the animate and inanimate stimuli). The predictions are also clear in light of the presented literature and the discussion considers the related literature. I applaud the authors for making their materials, data, and R codes available to the scientific community. I should note that the link provided in the “statistical analyses” section of the Manuscript leads to the “Materials” section on OSF. A clear note should also be made in the Manuscript on the fact that the materials are also made available. We thank the reviewer for the positive feedback and we now mention that the materials are also openly available (page 17). I only have a few comments for the authors to consider. At the end of the Introduction, the authors start by presenting their predictions and briefly describe the procedure. Then they have a section named ” The current study”. The first content could be integrated into such a section, thus avoiding some repetition of information that is occurring between these two parts; this would also make the reading more fluent and integrated. Thanks, we have now edited the manuscript accordingly. Participants: some justification needs to be provided regarding the sample size in both experiments. We now provide (a-posteriori) power analyses to address this concern (also see response to the editor above). Experiment 1- “A separate logistic regression model conducted for the German group revealed no significant intercept (i.e., no effect of ‘animacy’, Est. = 0.20, SE = 0.37, z = 0.53, p = 0.60) but a significant effect of ‘position’ (Est. = 7.67, SE = 0.57, z = 13.56, p < 0.001), indicating that the German group was more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was located on the left than when it was located on the right.” - the conclusion of this sentence does not seem consistent with the data nor with the remaining conclusions and discussion. We now rephrased this statement by saying “in line with a left-to-right bias.” Main Discussion: the ideas on page 33 regarding the effect of exposure of Arabic speakers to German are someone repeated. Please consider revising. Thanks for pointing this out. We substantially revised and edited our manuscript in order to avoid redundancy. Another element that might be compromising a stronger effect of animacy in children derives from the fact that a lot of common objects are presented as animates in children’s programs. For example, a sponge becomes “Sponge Bob”, cars become animates (e.g., Lightning Mcqueen, Mater, and so on), a train becomes “Thomas the Tank Engine” and all his companions, Dora the Explorer's Backpack, and many others. Thus, the clear differentiation between animates and inanimates may become somewhat “unclear” with such experiences. We thank the reviewer for this important remark. While in our study, we took care to use pictures of inanimate entities devoid of any animacy features (such as facial features, or autonomous movement), it is still possible that exposure to non-living yet ‘animate-like’ cartoon characters has mitigated the animacy effect in our study. We now acknowledge this possibility on page 28 of our manuscript. MINOR ASPECTS • “mean age: 4;11 years, range: 3;8 to 5;11 years).” – the ; should be , We follow conventions in the language acquisition literature that list children’s ages in terms of year;months. • “statistical analyses” is used in Exp 1 whereas “statistical results” is used in Exp 2 to refer to the same type of content. Thanks, we have adjusted this accordingly. # Reviewer 2: The study is straightforward, the method simple and the data are adequately analyzed. The manuscript is well written but lengthy in view of its theoretical contribution. I would recommend shortening the text to help speed up the reading. I think that careful editing may potentially achieve a reduction of 20% of the length of the introduciton adn discussion. Thanks for pointing this out. Based on this suggestion, we now substantially revised and shortened our manuscript in order to avoid redundancy. One limitation of the present study is a choice of method affording one measure. More specifically, response latencies were not measured, which may have provided additional useful information (e.g., the comparison of RTs between the German group and those participants from the Arabic group who showed a left-to-right preference could provide evidence of a possible cognitive cost in the latter). This is not a major issue, however. We agree that response latencies may have provided additional information, a limitation we have also pointed out in the original version of our manuscript (page 30). However, we also agree that this is not a major issue as the results are interpretable even in the absence of these additional measures. The authors do not appear to have based their sample on an a-priori power analysis. Low-powered studies incur a higher risk of false significant effects. The authors should justify their sample size and, since no power analysis was conducted a-priori, present the power achieved for the critical comparisons. For example, in Experiment 1, what was the power achieved given the sample size, Type I error of .05, and the effect size of the group x position of the animate noun interaction? Thanks! We now provide a-posteriori power analyses of the power achieved (for the central cross-cultural analyses as well as for examining the power of the effects in children as opposed to adults). To ensure a better flow of reading, we have added the relevant information to the supplementary materials. The code is available at OSF. Overall, the achieved power is high and the selected sample size appears appropriate. We would also like to note that the sample size was determined on the basis of previous work investigating conjoined noun phrases in children (Franz et al., 2021). This study investigated 18 preschool children. Furthermore, we also conducted a lab experiment in which we tested adult speakers of German. In this pilot study (which we do not report in the current paper in order to ensure a better comparability since all of our other experiments were web-based), we found strong effects of German participants starting their utterances with the left-most entity, even when considering a small sample size of n = 20, hence serving as an anchor for determining the sample size in the current study. Based on this previous research, we then aimed at obtaining approximately the same number of participants for the other cohorts (Arabic group, German children). From a theoretical perspective, the study does not appear to make any important contribution. Are the results of relevance for theoretical models? What would be these implications? Can anything be said about the relative weight of animacy and reading/production habits? What could be the roles of reading vs language production in shaping the effects reported here? We thank the reviewer for challenging us on this point. In the revised version of our manuscript, we now highlight the theoretical contributions of our study as well as its methodological implications. Critically, although previous studies are suggesting that spatial biases introduced by reading and writing habits (i.e., script directionality) exert a stronger impact on linear ordering than animacy (e.g. Baltaretu et al., 2016), direct evidence of this claim is currently missing. This is mainly due to the fact that previous observations are exclusively based on participants who are familiar with a left-to-right script. It is therefore possible that all kinds of other factors (e.g. the spatial arrangement of entities or a very subtle manipulation of animacy, etc.) have contributed to the observed findings, regardless of reading and writing directionality. For this reason, our study is the first to directly test the notion that reading and writing habits become more influential than animacy. Hence, our results speak to the relative weight of animacy and reading and writing habits. Our cross-cultural and developmental findings suggest that – once acquired – reading and writing habits become influential to an extent that they overwrite alternative factors such as animacy. These theoretical findings also come with practical implications: Given the wide-ranging influence of reading and writing habits, they have to be taken into account in experimental design. As our research shows, biases arise even in verbal tasks that tap into patterns of language production, highlighting the need for taking effects of reading and writing into consideration. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298659.r002
30 Jan 2024 Decision Letter - Montserrat Comesaña Vila, Editor Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic PONE-D-23-25451R1 Dear Dr. Sarah Dolscheid, 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, Montserrat Comesaña Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298659.r003
Formally Accepted
27 Mar 2024 Acceptance Letter - Montserrat Comesaña Vila, Editor PONE-D-23-25451R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Dolscheid, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, 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 customercare@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. Montserrat Comesaña Vila Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298659.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .