Boosting or inhibiting - how semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in German

Stefan Baumann; Janne Lorenzen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0299746

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 2, 2023
26 Dec 2023 Decision Letter - John Blake, Editor PONE-D-23-34944Boosting or inhibiting - How semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in GermanPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Baumann, 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 Feb 09 2024 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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Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: "This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the SFB1252 Prominence in Language (Project-ID 281511265), project A07 Metrical prominence – Scales and structures." Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: ""The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."" If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. 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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 ****** 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: Introduction: The Introduction section is well written and the research question is described clearly. The previous literature is reviewed such that a clear picture of the research question emerges. Section 2.2: It is mentioned that participants "originat[e] from five different federal states of Germany." Are there any potential differences between dialects of the participants? If not, state this explicitly. Is there any possible effect of gender? With only 4 male and 11 female speakers, the data is not balanced across gender. If there are differences, it would not necessarily be clear then due to this imbalance. This should be mentioned explicitly as a limitation. Section 2.3: Include the inter-rater reliability between the two annotators for word prominence level annotation. Also, how many words required a consensus from a third expert? When normalizing F0 by gender, what was the justification to use 75 Hz for males and 120 Hz for females? Why not normalize by individual mean F0 (per participant) instead to account for participant differences (regardless of gender)? Section 2.4: The statistical analysis is nicely presented. Section 4: The authors’ discussion following example (9) offers a plausible answer to the question of why initial position tends to attract nuclear accent: It’s a global preference and doesn’t depend on anything else. The authors might consider reframing their initial predictions then, or at least entertaining this possibility from the outset in the Introduction section rather than introducing it for the first time in the Discussion section. It need not be presented as such a surprising result, in other words. ****** 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 ******** [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.0299746.r001
Revision 1
22 Jan 2024 Author Response Dear Dr. Blake, We are happy to submit our revision for the manuscript entitled “Boosting or inhibiting - How semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in German”, authored by Stefan Baumann (corresponding author), and Janne Lorenzen. We thank you and the reviewer for the very helpful feedback. We have considered the points raised and give a point-by-point description below (our answers are given in italics). Furthermore, please change our online submission form on our behalf by adding to the statement on financial disclosure ("This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the SFB1252 Prominence in Language (Project-ID 281511265), project A07 Metrical prominence – Scales and structures.") the following sentence: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." Finally, we included our full ethics statement in the "Participants and experimental procedure" section of our manuscript file, including the full name of the ethics committee who approved our study. With kind regards, Stefan Baumann and Janne Lorenzen Response to Reviewer 1 Introduction: The Introduction section is well written and the research question is described clearly. The previous literature is reviewed such that a clear picture of the research question emerges. Section 2.2: It is mentioned that participants "originat[e] from five different federal states of Germany." Are there any potential differences between dialects of the participants? If not, state this explicitly. Thank you for this question. We added the statement "None of them spoke in a non-standard variety" to clarify this point. Is there any possible effect of gender? With only 4 male and 11 female speakers, the data is not balanced across gender. If there are differences, it would not necessarily be clear then due to this imbalance. This should be mentioned explicitly as a limitation. We added this information to a paragraph in the Discussion section, when talking about speaking style and focus. In particular, the following sentence was included: "Gender did not play a role, although we have to state that the dataset is not balanced across gender (see section Participants and experimental procedure)." Section 2.3: Include the inter-rater reliability between the two annotators for word prominence level annotation. Also, how many words required a consensus from a third expert? We included the inter-rater agreement for all prosodic annotations (phrase boundary, DIMA tone level, GToBI accent types and perceived prominence). The inverse of the agreement rates constitute the amount of annotations requiring a consensus with the third expert (e.g. an agreement rate of 94% means that we had to decide on a consensus annotation in 6% of the cases). When normalizing F0 by gender, what was the justification to use 75 Hz for males and 120 Hz for females? Why not normalize by individual mean F0 (per participant) instead to account for participant differences (regardless of gender)? We agree that a participant-specific normalization is the more thorough process and have adjusted the TCoG scaling variable and its analysis in this regard. The results do not change following this procedure. Section 2.4: The statistical analysis is nicely presented. Thank you. :-) Section 4: The authors’ discussion following example (9) offers a plausible answer to the question of why initial position tends to attract nuclear accent: It’s a global preference and doesn’t depend on anything else. The authors might consider reframing their initial predictions then, or at least entertaining this possibility from the outset in the Introduction section rather than introducing it for the first time in the Discussion section. It need not be presented as such a surprising result, in other words. First of all, initial position generally attracts accents, but mainly prenuclear ones (not nuclear accents). Secondly, we still want to say that we did not predict the initial position to be that strong, as we want to be transparent about our initial assumptions, but we tried to attenuate the "surprisal" to some extent, as suggested, by changing the wording, e.g. to "contrary to our predictions" (Conclusions section). We also prepared the rhythmical frame idea in the Introduction a bit more. In the Abstract, we deleted "somewhat surprisingly" completely. Thank you again for your valuable feedback! Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers_Baumann-Lorenzen.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299746.r002
16 Feb 2024 Decision Letter - John Blake, Editor Boosting or inhibiting - How semantic-pragmatic and syntactic cues affect prosodic prominence relations in German PONE-D-23-34944R1 Dear Dr. Baumann, 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, John Blake, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. 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 ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. 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 ****** 5. 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 ****** 6. 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 revisions took into account all the comments satisfactorily. The agreement rate for annotation of accentual vs. non-accentual tones (71%) was slightly low for a binary choice rating and may be worth commenting on in the final version. However, the 3rd party consensus is enough to catch most/all of these. ****** 7. 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 ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299746.r003
Formally Accepted
27 Feb 2024 Acceptance Letter - John Blake, Editor PONE-D-23-34944R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Baumann, 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. John Blake Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299746.r004

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