PONE-D-23-24720Young English-speaking Children’s Interpretation of Inclusive We: Effects of Group EntitativityPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Vasil,

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 Dec 01 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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Barbara T Rumain, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

Reviewer 1:

This paper reports the results of two virtual experiments examining the interpretation of the inclusive pronoun “we” by 2- and 4-year-olds. The two experiments differed in the context of the task. In the first experiment, the partners (and potential referents of the pronoun “we”) appeared like an aggregation of individuals, whereas in the second, they were presented as a collaborative group. The results showed that children more often interpret “we” as referring to a group in a collaborative group context (second experiment) than when it was not the case (first experiment) but, and it is a weakness of the paper, it is the only reliable result of the study. However, the paper is clear and well-written, the study is undertaken in a careful manner and the data are handled appropriately.

Minor comments:

- Naming the two experiments “pilot experiment” and “main experiment” respectively is not really justified, so why not just name them Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.

- It is rather surprising that the authors refer to the variable sex when they are apparently referring to the gender of the participants. Unless they are referring solely to biological and physiological differences between males and females, the variables sex and gender are at least confounded here. This point needs to be clarified.

- The methodology sections are a little confusing to read. In the first experiment, in the participants section, it is mentioned that seven participants were excluded and then, in the coding section, it is mentioned that 60 trials were excluded, which seems to take into account the trials of the participants excluded above. Why not mention here only the trials excluded from the trials of the 64 participants retained for the study? Same comment for the second experiment.

- Still regarding excluded trials, “Of the 60 excluded 9 trials, 7 participants contributed 3 trials (21 trials), 13 contributed 2 trials (26 trials), and 13contributed 1 trial (13 trials)” (p.11). Is this information really important? And if so, what does it contribute? If not, I suggest dropping this information. Same comment for the second experiment.

- Please do not use E for experimenter or put it in brackets when first mentioned. Idem for P for participant.

- I'm not familiar with Bayesian models (and I guess I'm not the only one), how were the priors chosen (p.12)?

- As underlined by the authors in the general discussion (p.32), the variable sex/gender was not purposely manipulated (in both experiments, there were far fewer males than females) and the observed effects of sex/gender were statistically weak. The effects of this variable are therefore not worth mentioning in the abstract and in the final conclusion (p.35).

Reviewer 2:

The data doesn't support all of the conclusions drawn. The results are potentially confounded in a few different ways (detailed in my review) and yet the authors - while very open and and honest about what the stats show - still conclude mostly with the hypothesis and don't consider reasonable alternatives that may explain their results (which were mostly unexpected relative to the hypothesis)

NOTE: REVIEWER 2 ALSO SUBMITTED A 4-PAGE pdf WITH COMMENTS. PLEASE SEE THIS pdf, WHICH IS ATTACHED.

[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: Partly

**********

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: This paper reports the results of two virtual experiments examining the interpretation of the inclusive pronoun “we” by 2- and 4-year-olds. The two experiments differed in the context of the task. In the first experiment, the partners (and potential referents of the pronoun “we”) appeared like an aggregation of individuals, whereas in the second, they were presented as a collaborative group. The results showed that children more often interpret “we” as referring to a group in a collaborative group context (second experiment) than when it was not the case (first experiment) but, and it is a weakness of the paper, it is the only reliable result of the study. However, the paper is clear and well-written, the study is undertaken in a careful manner and the data are handled appropriately.

Minor comments:

- Naming the two experiments “pilot experiment” and “main experiment” respectively is not really justified, so why not just name them Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.

- It is rather surprising that the authors refer to the variable sex when they are apparently referring to the gender of the participants. Unless they are referring solely to biological and physiological differences between males and females, the variables sex and gender are at least confounded here. This point needs to be clarified.

- The methodology sections are a little confusing to read. In the first experiment, in the participants section, it is mentioned that seven participants were excluded and then, in the coding section, it is mentioned that 60 trials were excluded, which seems to take into account the trials of the participants excluded above. Why not mention here only the trials excluded from the trials of the 64 participants retained for the study? Same comment for the second experiment.

- Still regarding excluded trials, “Of the 60 excluded 9 trials, 7 participants contributed 3 trials (21 trials), 13 contributed 2 trials (26 trials), and 13contributed 1 trial (13 trials)” (p.11). Is this information really important? And if so, what does it contribute? If not, I suggest dropping this information. Same comment for the second experiment.

- Please do not use E for experimenter or put it in brackets when first mentioned. Idem for P for participant.

- I'm not familiar with Bayesian models (and I guess I'm not the only one), how were the priors chosen (p.12)?

- As underlined by the authors in the general discussion (p.32), the variable sex/gender was not purposely manipulated (in both experiments, there were far fewer males than females) and the observed effects of sex/gender were statistically weak. The effects of this variable are therefore not worth mentioning in the abstract and in the final conclusion (p.35).

Reviewer #2: The data doesn't support all of the conclusions drawn. The results are potentially confounded in a few different ways (detailed in my review) and yet the authors - while very open and and honest about what the stats show - still conclude mostly with the hypothesis and don't consider reasonable alternatives that may explain their results (which were mostly unexpected relative to the hypothesis)

**********

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

**********

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Reviewer 2.pdf

PONE-D-23-24720R1Young English-speaking Children’s Interpretation of Inclusive We: Effects of Group EntitativityPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Vasil,

Please submit a minor revision that addresses the comments in the review below:

Reviewer #3: Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to read this manuscript. The paper is very clearly and well written, and the methods were obviously very carefully designed. The following “review” is different from a review I normally write. It is instead more like a musing on the current findings (which is a signal that it is an interesting paper!). I do think recruiting some adult participants to engage in the tasks that children did (or some modification of them that is more appropriate for adults) would help disambiguate whether results tell us something about development (only) and/or whether some aspects of study design and linguistic stimuli drive interpretations in some unexpected ways (for all English speakers, regardless of age). The authors suggest doing this in the discussion with lab members, but I would caution against including any adult participants who know anything about the current study and its aims. I motivate this idea in detail in the following:

When I read the abstract for the study and initially scanned the methods, I anticipated three groups to which “we” would refer:

1. The speaker puppet and interlocutor (child); the “dyad” interpretation, included in this paper

2. The speaker puppet and interlocutor (child), along with an/some additional puppet(s); the “group” interpretation, referred to in the paper

3. The speaker puppet and the other puppets; not included in the paper

The interpretation of 3 as a group is not discussed as a possibility in this paper, but when I did my initial reading, I actually thought that that group seemed like the most likely and salient interpretation for “we,” since all three puppets are: 1) on the same side of the computer; 2) in the same physical space; 3) have important attributes in common – they are all animals and puppets! I was worried that the dominance of the puppet group might confuse findings.

Happily, upon reading the methods more carefully, I learned that the researchers designed their methods so that the child always considered themselves a part of the group. Correspondingly, results seem to indicate that the careful design of the study, along with warmup trials and preliminary discourse (e.g., making sure the child had markers, too) encouraged children to consider themselves a member of “we.”

However, I do think the confusing findings related to “we both” may be (at least partially) explained by the salience of the puppet group. “We both” is an odd expression. Since first reading this paper, I’ve been thinking about how I use that phrase. It is harder to think of situations when I would use “we both” to request than it is when I would use it to describe past or future events (“We both felt that way!” or “tomorrow we both are going to go vote”). Importantly, the situations in which I would use “we both” to request/command are ones when I’m emphasizing that another person should do something with me (i.e., I’m emphasizing the “we” by using “both”, e.g., “no, we BOTH need to go vote tomorrow”) rather than clarifying that I mean a dyadic group vs a larger group. To specify a dyad (vs a group), I would say “you and I”. Not “we both”.

Returning to the current paradigm, if I were on a zoom call with a group of people (where the other people were all in the same space, like the puppets are in the current study), and one of them said to me “we both can take notes,” I believe I would interpret “we both” as referring to the speaker and one other member of the group of people in the same physical space, on the other side of the screen. If the speaker wanted to specify that she meant to include me and herself, I would expect her to say, “you and I can take notes” (while looking at me – I see a previous reviewer talked about the role of gaze).

Now, again, I know that the current paradigms do a lot to ensure that the person on the other side of the zoom call (the child in this case) feels like they are always a member of “we”, so this may, again, override the saliency of the fact that the puppets are all in the same room.

Still, this makes me wish that the paradigm was tested on adults. If other adults interpreted sentences the way I (think) I would, they should show a tendency to give markers to two puppets for “we both” and to three puppets for “we all.” Would it be possible to run some version of this paradigm on a few adults, who are naïve to the study’s goals? I do think that their interpretations would be helpful in understanding children’s responses.

Coming back to children’s responses, I suspect that what is described in the discussion relating to quantifiers -- about how young children (don’t) understand quantifiers -- is mostly responsible for current findings, where the addition of “all” or “both” doesn’t reliably predict whether children pick one or more puppets to participate in a task. However, it might be worth taking a quick look at the number of additional puppets selected when they made group interpretations. If participants interpreted “we both” like I think I would (I would guess only four year olds would have this interpretation, if any children did), they should be more likely to select two versus three puppets for “we both” vs “we all.” This effect (if there is one) might be stronger in Study 2, since there are additional factors encouraging children to consider the other puppets as part of the speaker puppet’s group.

For future, I think using an in-person version of this would help as it would eliminate the confounding variable where some people are in one physical space and others are not. I also suggest including unambiguous pronominal phrases like “you and I,” “you,” and “I” to ensure that participants respond to those phrases as expected. This way, when surprising interpretations of “we”, “we both” and/or “we all” are discovered, they can be more assuredly tied to children’s interpretations of these phrases, rather than their confusion about how *any* pronoun works in the current context.

Two additional comments/questions:

The inclusion of sex as a predictor variable is not motivated in the introduction/hypotheses.

What steps were taken to ensure that children were typically developing (or at least typically developing, with respect to language development)?

Please submit the revised manuscript by Jun 07 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the reviewer. 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,

Barbara T Rumain, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

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. 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 #3: (No Response)

********** 

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 #3: Yes

********** 

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

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

********** 

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 #3: 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 #3: 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 #3: Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to read this manuscript. The paper is very clearly and well written, and the methods were obviously very carefully designed. The following “review” is different from a review I normally write. It is instead more like a musing on the current findings (which is a signal that it is an interesting paper!). I do think recruiting some adult participants to engage in the tasks that children did (or some modification of them that is more appropriate for adults) would help disambiguate whether results tell us something about development (only) and/or whether some aspects of study design and linguistic stimuli drive interpretations in some unexpected ways (for all English speakers, regardless of age). The authors suggest doing this in the discussion with lab members, but I would caution against including any adult participants who know anything about the current study and its aims. I motivate this idea in detail in the following:

When I read the abstract for the study and initially scanned the methods, I anticipated three groups to which “we” would refer:

1. The speaker puppet and interlocutor (child); the “dyad” interpretation, included in this paper

2. The speaker puppet and interlocutor (child), along with an/some additional puppet(s); the “group” interpretation, referred to in the paper

3. The speaker puppet and the other puppets; not included in the paper

The interpretation of 3 as a group is not discussed as a possibility in this paper, but when I did my initial reading, I actually thought that that group seemed like the most likely and salient interpretation for “we,” since all three puppets are: 1) on the same side of the computer; 2) in the same physical space; 3) have important attributes in common – they are all animals and puppets! I was worried that the dominance of the puppet group might confuse findings.

Happily, upon reading the methods more carefully, I learned that the researchers designed their methods so that the child always considered themselves a part of the group. Correspondingly, results seem to indicate that the careful design of the study, along with warmup trials and preliminary discourse (e.g., making sure the child had markers, too) encouraged children to consider themselves a member of “we.”

However, I do think the confusing findings related to “we both” may be (at least partially) explained by the salience of the puppet group. “We both” is an odd expression. Since first reading this paper, I’ve been thinking about how I use that phrase. It is harder to think of situations when I would use “we both” to request than it is when I would use it to describe past or future events (“We both felt that way!” or “tomorrow we both are going to go vote”). Importantly, the situations in which I would use “we both” to request/command are ones when I’m emphasizing that another person should do something with me (i.e., I’m emphasizing the “we” by using “both”, e.g., “no, we BOTH need to go vote tomorrow”) rather than clarifying that I mean a dyadic group vs a larger group. To specify a dyad (vs a group), I would say “you and I”. Not “we both”.

Returning to the current paradigm, if I were on a zoom call with a group of people (where the other people were all in the same space, like the puppets are in the current study), and one of them said to me “we both can take notes,” I believe I would interpret “we both” as referring to the speaker and one other member of the group of people in the same physical space, on the other side of the screen. If the speaker wanted to specify that she meant to include me and herself, I would expect her to say, “you and I can take notes” (while looking at me – I see a previous reviewer talked about the role of gaze).

Now, again, I know that the current paradigms do a lot to ensure that the person on the other side of the zoom call (the child in this case) feels like they are always a member of “we”, so this may, again, override the saliency of the fact that the puppets are all in the same room.

Still, this makes me wish that the paradigm was tested on adults. If other adults interpreted sentences the way I (think) I would, they should show a tendency to give markers to two puppets for “we both” and to three puppets for “we all.” Would it be possible to run some version of this paradigm on a few adults, who are naïve to the study’s goals? I do think that their interpretations would be helpful in understanding children’s responses.

Coming back to children’s responses, I suspect that what is described in the discussion relating to quantifiers -- about how young children (don’t) understand quantifiers -- is mostly responsible for current findings, where the addition of “all” or “both” doesn’t reliably predict whether children pick one or more puppets to participate in a task. However, it might be worth taking a quick look at the number of additional puppets selected when they made group interpretations. If participants interpreted “we both” like I think I would (I would guess only four year olds would have this interpretation, if any children did), they should be more likely to select two versus three puppets for “we both” vs “we all.” This effect (if there is one) might be stronger in Study 2, since there are additional factors encouraging children to consider the other puppets as part of the speaker puppet’s group.

For future, I think using an in-person version of this would help as it would eliminate the confounding variable where some people are in one physical space and others are not. I also suggest including unambiguous pronominal phrases like “you and I,” “you,” and “I” to ensure that participants respond to those phrases as expected. This way, when surprising interpretations of “we”, “we both” and/or “we all” are discovered, they can be more assuredly tied to children’s interpretations of these phrases, rather than their confusion about how *any* pronoun works in the current context.

Two additional comments/questions:

The inclusion of sex as a predictor variable is not motivated in the introduction/hypotheses.

What steps were taken to ensure that children were typically developing (or at least typically developing, with respect to language development)?

********** 

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 #3: 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.

Effects of Group Entitativity on Young English-speaking Children’s Interpretation of Inclusive We

PONE-D-23-24720R2

Dear Dr. Vasil,

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.

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Kind regards,

Barbara T Rumain, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE