Transfer Alert

This paper was transferred from another journal. As a result, its full editorial history (including decision letters, peer reviews and author responses) may not be present.

PONE-D-24-30989Hearing and cognitive decline in aging differentially impact neural tracking of context-supported versus random speech across linguistic timescalesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Bolt,

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. Both reviewers and myself are very impressed with your submission. The manuscript is well written, thorough, and covers an interesting and timely topic. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 14 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 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,

Kathrin Rothermich

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

plos.org/plosone/s/file%3fid=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf%20andWhen 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. Please note that funding information should not appear in any section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript.

3. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: “This study was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, SNSF, www.snf.ch, grant number PR00P1 185715 to Nathalie Giroud”

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. We note that your Data Availability Statement is currently as follows: “All relevant data are within the manuscript and in Supporting Information files.”

Please confirm at this time whether or not your submission contains all raw data required to replicate the results of your study. Authors must share the “minimal data set” for their submission. PLOS defines the minimal data set to consist of the data required to replicate all study findings reported in the article, as well as related metadata and methods (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-minimal-data-set-definition). For example, authors should submit the following data: - The values behind the means, standard deviations and other measures reported; - The values used to build graphs; - The points extracted from images for analysis. Authors do not need to submit their entire data set if only a portion of the data was used in the reported study. If your submission does not contain these data, please either upload them as Supporting Information files or deposit them to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of recommended repositories, please see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/recommended-repositories. If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. If data are owned by a third party, please indicate how others may request data access.

5. When completing the data availability statement of the submission form, you indicated that you will make your data available on acceptance. We strongly recommend all authors decide on a data sharing plan before acceptance, as the process can be lengthy and hold up publication timelines. Please note that, though access restrictions are acceptable now, your entire data will need to be made freely accessible if your manuscript is accepted for publication. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If you are unable to adhere to our open data policy, please kindly revise your statement to explain your reasoning and we will seek the editor's input on an exemption. Please be assured that, once you have provided your new statement, the assessment of your exemption will not hold up the peer review process.

6. 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: Thank you for the opportunity to review this well-written manuscript on a fascinating topic.

I only have a few minor comments for the authors:

The manuscript contains question marks instead of key references, which must be addressed and verified before publication.

The author should aim for better figure and table placement in the final manuscript, as the placement in this version created some confusion. This said the results were generally well presented and well summarised.

Any minor technical or conceptual issue I had about the protocol was addressed correctly in the limitations section.

Reviewer #2: An interesting and well-written paper. Most caveats have already been identified in the discussion. Here are my comments:

- line 47: reference missing

- line 51-53: “our previous study” comes as a surprise to the reader, reformulate

- line 53: reference missing

- line 85: “discrete chunks of acoustic units”, shouldn’t it rather be linguistic units?

- line 88: add number of participants

- line 89: explain what matrix sentences are, not everyone knows that

- line 134-136: change order of sentences: “The main goal of this behavioral speech recognition task after each stimulus was to maintain their attention and ensure that they listened. Participants performed well, answering correctly in 96 ± 4% of the trials. No participant scored below 85% correct responses. This task was designed to be easy, and we excluded all trials with incorrect responses from neurophysiological analyses.”

- line 160: can you add a plot to the supplementary information with the AEPs of each subject individually laid over each other (averaged across the relevant EEG channels)

- line 209-211: can you elaborate why you assume that why the parietal cluster result would originate from frontocentral electrodes? And the formulation is a bit cryptic, i.e., “Across the scalp” to me means all electrodes, but then you talk about the parietal cluster. Also I think the idea of also including clusters in your statistical analysis is not explained properly before you report the results, so please do that.

- line 225-227: idem previous comment

- Figure 3B: add individual data points please, you can make them transparent if you think the plot becomes too busy

- line 230-232: are the post hoc comparisons not significant (even though the interaction is) due to correction for multiple comparisons? I am just trying to understand how come none of the post hoc comparisons was significant.

- line 259-261: “As hearing ability increased, tracking at the phoneme rate increased.” this is the opposite of what the plot 3B shows, isn’t it? You measure PTA in dbHL, that means that the higher the PTA value is, the worse their hearing ability is. Thus, it should be “As hearing ability decreased, tracking at the phoneme rate increased.” Make sure throughout the paper that you get this correct.

- line 267-268: “a lower chance of correct responses”, this seems to be a bit of a complicated formulation to say that they ha decreased response accuracy. Can you change that throughout the manuscript please?

- line 290-293: maybe add already here that the absence of an effect of cognitive decline on N400 might be related to your low MoCA group being very mild, with 9 participants actually scoring only one point below the clinical cut-off threshold

- line 341-344 and line 361-364: these speculations about non-significant effects are a bit too speculative, I would remove that

- section Strengths and limitations of the study: add that you have a limited variability of hearing loss in your sample, which might veil effects of PTA

- line 427: reference missing

- line 441-442: use “decreasing response accuracy” instead of “lower chance of correct responses”

- line 465: reference missing

- line 580: reference missing

- line 710-711: “ensuring” is a bit too strong, replace with “targeting”, or “trying to target”

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Jill Kries, PhD

**********

[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.

Hearing and cognitive decline in aging differentially impact neural tracking of context-supported versus random speech across linguistic timescales

PONE-D-24-30989R1

Dear Dr. Bolt,

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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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,

Kathrin Rothermich

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: