https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7361-0980
Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionSeptember 29, 2023 |
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PONE-D-23-27730Cortical encoding of phonetic onsets of both attended and ignored speech in hearing impaired individualsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Di Liberto, 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 22 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:
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, Caicai Zhang 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 2. Thank you for stating in your Funding Statement: “This work was conducted with the financial support of the William Demant Fonden (https://www.williamdemantfonden.dk/), grant 21-0628 and grant 22-0552 and of the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence (https://www.crt-ai.ie/), under Grant No. 18/CRT/6223. This research was supported by the Science Foundation Ireland under Grant Agreement No. 13/RC/2106_P2 at the ADAPT SFI Research Centre (https://www.sfi.ie/sfi-research-centres/adapt/) at Trinity College Dublin. ADAPT, the SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology, is funded by Science Foundation Ireland through the SFI Research Centres Programme.” Please provide an amended statement that declares *all* the funding or sources of support (whether external or internal to your organization) received during this study, as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now. Please also include the statement “There was no additional external funding received for this study.” in your updated Funding Statement. Please include your amended Funding Statement within your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere. [A different analysis of the same dataset was published as part of another study by Alickovic et al. (2021) in Frontiers in Neuroscience (https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2021.636060).] Please clarify whether this [conference proceeding or publication] was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript. 4. Please update your submission to use the PLOS LaTeX template. The template and more information on our requirements for LaTeX submissions can be found at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/latex. 5. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “This work was conducted with the financial support of the William Demant Foundation, grant 21-0628 and grant 22-0552 and of the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence, under Grant No. 18/CRT/6223. This research was supported by the Science Foundation Ireland under Grant Agreement No. 13/RC/2106_P2 at the ADAPT SFI Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin. ADAPT, the SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology” We note that you have provided additional information within the Acknowledgements Section that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. Please note that funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments 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 and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: “This work was conducted with the financial support of the William Demant Foundation, grant 37 21-0628 and grant 22-0552 and of the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training 38 in Artificial Intelligence, under Grant No. 18/CRT/6223. This research was supported by the 39 Science Foundation Ireland under Grant Agreement No. 13/RC/2106_P2 at the ADAPT SFI 40 Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin. ADAPT, the SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven 41 Digital Content Technology” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. [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: Partly 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: No Reviewer #2: No ********** 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 article is very well written and contains relevant references to the topic discussed. However, there are some points that can be improved. Therefore, I present my considerations below. Methods: In the ethics statement session, the information presented in lines 128 and 129 should be present in the participants session. Furthermore, there is a major flaw at this point, as the author reports that 34 individuals were evaluated but describes only 10 female individuals. Where is the information on the remaining 24 individuals? Are they male? How old is it? What is the mean age? What is the standard deviation? Is there a control group? Was the article written exclusively by individuals with hearing loss? On the other hand, the information contained in "Data Availability" lines 301 to 309 should be detailed in ethics statement session. Another point I would like to know is why a study that was completed at the beginning of 2020 was only submitted for consideration at the end of 2023? Another extremely critical point in this article is in lines 137 and 138 "for furtheer details on their hearing profile, hearing aid fitting, and signal processing see ALickovic et al, 2021". Readers need access to this data in this article. It makes no sense to direct the reader to another article. Therefore, review this sentence and present all the data in this publication. It should be noted that the absence of this information makes it impossible for the reader to visualize the data and provide a correct understanding. In the experimental design session, the authors presented very important data regarding signal processing as well as the way sound is presented. The figures are clear and well explanatory, however, information about the EEG was scarce. I recommend that the authors provide clearer information about the EEG data, mentioning filter, sweeps and, for example, a figure with the 64 electrodes positioned. Since, the author describes that he used the international 10/20 system, but does not show or describe the positioned points (example: FPZ, FZ, OZ among others). Authors must remember that the article must serve as a basis for new research and, as the article presents itself, it does not allow for this possibility. In the results, I did not see information about the homogeneity of the groups in relation to gender, age and hearing loss, for example. I would like to have understood the degree of hearing loss of the individuals. Did everyone have the same degree? Where's the information? Due to the lack of information mentioned above, the discussion also does not lead the reader to understand the characteristics of hearing loss. It is essential that there is a rearrangement in the article so that the results and discussions can really provide objective and direct information. To do so, we need to understand who the individuals who were evaluated are. The article has an important methodological flaw that needs to be remedied. Another question that intrigues would be the existence of a control group in this study. Could it be that the responses presented in individuals with hearing loss would not be similar in hearing individuals, since the competitive sound actually causes difficulties in understanding and understanding. Therefore, it is vital that there is a control group that can confirm the authors' findings. Therefore, I recommend that the article be reorganized to comply with good methodological practices. With reformulations, adjustments to the results, discussion and conclusion are necessary. Reviewer #2: This paper presents an experimental study on cortical encoding of phonetic onsets of both attended and unattended speech stimuli in a multi-talker condition for hearing-impaired listeners. The idea and conclusions are quite well summarised, and this work is appropriate to be published in this journal. However, there are some issues that have to addressed before publication. 1. Some sections of the paper must be presented in a more concise way, e.g., abstract, introduction and discussion. The authors should not present so many open questions in the paper, as they would for sure confuse the reader which is the focus or major question that you are going to answer. These contents should be organised in a better way. 2. There are some writing mistakes in the current form, e.g., " it was only recently that neurophysiology studies could analyse the cortical encoding...", where a verb might be missing. There are many similar problems in the paper. Also, please unify the usage of British or American English spelling, e.g., regularise or regularize. On page 18, please unify the font size. Please go throughout the manuscript and correct similar problems before resubmission. 3. It was found in experiments that cortical responses in participants with HI relate to phonetic features more strongly for the target than the masker streams, but isolating the different contributors to phonetic feature encoding results in a significant cortical encoding of phoneme onsets of both target and masker speech with a stronger representation of the masker, which is also similarly emphasised in the discussion section. Could you please explain more on this point? because these two observations seem contradictory to each other. Can phoneme onset be regarded as one of phonetic features? 4. Some interesting conclusions are drawn in the paper, however I cannot imagine the relation to practical applications, e.g., hearing aids. For hearing-aid users, we would like to enhance the target speech, suppress the competing speaker and preserve the spatial cues of all directional sources, see the recommended references. 5. In multi-talker conditions, the most important task would be target speaker extraction, if EEG is more useful than direction-of-arrival (DOA) to help speech separation? 6. In experiments, a noise reduction algorithm was utilised to see the impact of background noises, where speech distortion is inevitable. Can you quantify the speech distortion level or speech intelligibility? 7. Recommended references: [A] J Zhang, QT Xu, QS Zhu, ZH Ling, BASEN: Time-Domain Brain-Assisted Speech Enhancement Network with Convolutional Cross Attention in Multi-talker Conditions, in Proc. ISCA Interspeech, 2023. [B] J Zhang, C Li, Quantization-aware binaural MWF based noise reduction incorporating external wireless devices IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 29, 3118-3131, 2021. [C] J Zhang, G Zhang, A parametric unconstrained beamformer based binaural noise reduction for assistive hearing IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 30, 292-304, 2022. ********** 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. |
| Revision 1 |
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PONE-D-23-27730R1Cortical encoding of phonetic onsets of both attended and ignored speech in hearing impaired individualsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Di Liberto, 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 see my additional comments below. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 23 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:
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, Caicai Zhang Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments: Because one of the original reviewers indicated unavailability, an additional reviewer was solicited. Now three reviews were returned, and they gave contradictory recommendations. Thus I have examined the revised manuscript more carefully and also re-read the authors' responses to the reviews. I think I agree with all the reviewers that this manuscript adopts a novel approach (TRF) to examine cortical tracking of attended and ignored speech in individuals with hearing impairment, and has the potential to make a significant contribution to the field. Being a first attempt in this direction, this study also has limitations (e.g., large range of age differences, lack of a control group) that should be properly addressed and acknowledged. Thus I'd like to recommend the following action from the authors, apart from addressing the specific comments from the reviewers: 1. I checked Alickovic et al. (2021), and couldn't find detailed report of the participant information. Thus I'd suggest the authors add a table in the current manuscript (or in supplementary materials), detailing the age, gender and hearing loss level for each of the 34 participants. 2. Age difference is indeed a concern, as hearing and auditory processing systems change dramatically over age. As the participants aged between 21 and 84 years, it is questionable whether the findings of the current study are primarily driven by a particular age group (e.g., old adults), or whether it apply universally to all ages. If the authors have had more participants, they could try to divide the participants into age groups, but that's not realistic here. I suggest the authors include age as a covariate into the statistical analyses (e.g., three-way ANOVAs) and check if age dramatically changes the results. Alternatively, if the participants are mainly older adults, perhaps the authors could conduct analysis on a subset of the data by excluding young adults, but the sample size will become smaller. Please also comment on how age difference may have impacted the results and the interpretation, as a limitation (apart from the sentence on line 500-502). 3. I think it'll be a good idea to acknowledge the lack of control group as another limitation of the current study. In addition, I have a comment about the use of phonological processing and phonetic features. In the abstract, the authors proposed a hypothesis of phonological encoding difficulty. However, this hypothesis was not explained further in the introduction, especially what measures would indicate phonological and non-phonological encoding, and the specific predictions about these measures. Also, the authors did not return to this hypothesis in the discussion, to discuss whether the results confirmed this hypothesis or not, and if so, whether fully or partly, etc. Throughout a large part of the manuscript, the authors used a different term "phonetic features" and seemed to use it against acoustics. I wonder what's the relationship between "phonetic features" and phonological encoding. It is true that phonology and phonetics are sometimes used interchangeably in the literature, but to many people they're distinct (e.g., phonology referring to abstract phonemes, whereas phonetics includes variations across speakers, phonetic contexts, etc.). It will be helpful if the authors could elaborate on the relationship between these terminologies if they're intended to be different, or, if they were intended to mean the same thing, then use one terminology consistently across the manuscript. I also have some issue with the conclusion that the results confirmed the hypothesis (again this was only briefly said in the abstract and not carefully discussed in the discussion). To many people, phonological encoding means abstract, acoustically invariant phonemes. However, following this definition, the results did not provide evidence for the encoding of acoustically invariant features in the target and masker speech streams. What the results showed was something very specific, the encoding of phoneme onsets. Thus I don't think it's appropriate to simply conclude that the results confirmed the hypothesis. [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 #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed 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 #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Partly Reviewer #3: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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: No Reviewer #2: No 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 #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes 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 #1: Dear authors, Thank you for taking the time to thoroughly read the manuscript. As was already said, the topic is significant, the article is well-written, however there are still unanswered questions. Although there was a legitimate worry about the way the hidden material was presented, the study cannot be published in its current form due to significant methodological issues. the wide age span that includes everything from young adults to the elderly. This is a crucial factor because it is well known that the ability to perceive speech declines with age, which is why the volunteers were not well chosen. Another significant factor influencing how speech sounds are perceived is the difference between the sexes. A quick report on the information from the hearing assessments is given. This data is essential to comprehending the characteristics of the participants and the rationale for the conclusions. Without concentrating on participant data, the article's emphasis is in providing a detailed presentation of the technology. Nonetheless, the article entails assessing and analyzing the responses provided by the participants. which the writers mostly disregarded. I heartily advise that a fresh investigation be conducted, but this time it should consider the research participants. Reviewer #2: (No Response) Reviewer #3: This manuscript addresses a significant topic, employing temporal response function (TRF) analysis to explore cortical responses to phonological features within sentences among individuals with hearing impairments. It offers novel insights into the auditory attentional selection mechanisms related to hearing impairments. 1. The description of the results in the Abstract is somewhat unclear: “Multivariate temporal response function analyses indicated a stronger phonetic-feature encoding for target than masker speech streams. Interestingly, robust EEG encoding of phoneme onsets emerged for both target and masker streams, in contrast with previously published findings with normal hearing participants (NH) and in line with our hypothesis that speech comprehension difficulties emerge due to a robust phonological encoding of both target and masker. Finally, the neural encoding on phoneme-onsets encoding was stronger for the masker speech, pointing to a possible neural basis for the higher distractibility experienced by individuals with HI.” These sentences introduce the results from three minor perspectives, but it's unclear whether phonetic features, phonological features, and phoneme onsets are independent. At least, I believe that phoneme onsets are a type of phonological feature, so the Abstract's depiction of the results seems confusing. In addition, it would be better to add some logical expressions instead of merely using terms like "Interestingly" and "Finally" to relate the results. 2. Organizing the Introduction into paragraphs would make it clearer and more logically structured for the reader. 3. “All participants were native Danish speakers and had mild-to-moderately severe symmetrical sensorineural hearing impairment, with an average 4-frequency Pure Tone Average threshold of 47.5 dB hearing level.” It would be beneficial to provide information on the degree of hearing loss to see if there are differences among individuals with varying levels of hearing impairment. At least, authors should provide the standard deviation of 4-frequency Pure Tone Average threshold of 47.5 dB hearing level. 4. Why was only 10% of the corpus manually checked? What was the focus of this manual check, and how can you ensure the remaining 90% of the corpus is problem-free and meets the requirements? 5. How were the features shuffled (from F to Fs), and how were the phoneme onsets extracted? Please add detailed information about signal processing. 6. What does PhOnset mean, and what is the definition of FshS? 7. Figure 2c's resolution is not high enough, making the image somewhat blurry. Could you explain in detail the value of the phonetic distance feature in the article? Should the article also discuss the brain processing mechanisms of phonetic distances? Additionally, why are the points in the consonant map inconsistent between Fig 2.c. and Fig S2c? What does the "?" in the consonant map represent? 8. The author only included the results of the NR ON condition in the supporting information and did not calculate or discuss in detail the differences in the brain's decoding schemes between NR ON and OFF conditions. I believe this discussion is meaningful and necessary. Why not discuss the TRF encoding response under the conditions of the noise reduction algorithm being turned on and off in more detail? 9. Furthermore, the author should provide behavioral results (such as the correct rate of multiple-choice questions in the experiment) to prove that the participants were conducting the experiment according to the instructions. If the experimental subjects were focused on a mixed speech stream or the wrong speech stream, it does not exclude the possibility of obtaining the results reported in this paper (both target and ignore speech streams have significant cortical tracking effects, and the phoneme-onset response to the ignore speech stream is stronger). Therefore, the experimental conclusions of this paper have not been fully substantiated. The author could also provide more EEG analysis results to prove that the participants indeed focused on the correct speech stream as per the experimental setup. ********** 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 Reviewer #2: No 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. |
| Revision 2 |
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PONE-D-23-27730R2 Cortical encoding of phonetic onsets of both attended and ignored speech in hearing impaired individuals PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Di Liberto, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we have decided that your manuscript does not meet our criteria for publication and must therefore be rejected. I am sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion, but hope that you appreciate the reasons for this decision. Kind regards, Caicai Zhang Academic Editor PLOS ONE [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 #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #3: 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: Partly Reviewer #3: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #3: 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: No Reviewer #3: No ********** 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 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 #1: Dear authors, The authors implemented multiple revisions to the text, resulting in a notable enhancement in its overall quality. Nevertheless, there are crucial aspects of the process that have not been sufficiently explained. Below, I provide several points, including: 1) The authors included a table displaying the auditory thresholds of 21 individuals. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the referent of the values is ambiguous. The authors assert that hearing loss is bilateral, however they fail to provide independent data for each ear, which is crucial for a comprehensive tonal audiometry. 2) Additionally, they fail to provide the globally recognized rules for classifying hearing loss, such as those established by the World Health Organization (WHO) or by Lloyd and Kaplan. An unstable and inexplicable table that further consolidates concerns over the caliber of this evaluation. 3) In order to be published in a academic journal such as Plos One, the data must be easily accessible and transparent. Furthermore, it is crucial to provide the air and bone data for each ear individually. 4) Regarding the hearing loss, the approach should indicate which of the four frequencies were utilized to calculate the average. 5) The authors provide a table with 21 participants. However, they state in the paper that they eliminated people aged between 21 and 45 years old. This contradicts what is presented in the table, as there is an individual listed as 21 years old. The faults persist and have not been rectified as anticipated following a second review, wherein the editor provided specific points of concern. Reviewer #3: (No Response) ********** 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 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.] - - - - - For journal use only: PONEDEC3 |
| Revision 3 |
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Cortical encoding of phonetic onsets of both attended and ignored speech in hearing impaired individuals PONE-D-23-27730R3 Dear Dr. Di Liberto, 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, Andrew R Dykstra Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): 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 #4: 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 #4: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #4: 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 #4: 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 #4: 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 #4: I was brought in as a third reviewer, presumably to assess the author's response to previous reviewers and provide my own review. Based on the previous responses, I agree with all of the authors' responses, and I fully endorse the publication of the article. ********** 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 #4: Yes: Erol Ozmeral ********** |
| Formally Accepted |
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PONE-D-23-27730R3 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Di Liberto, 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. Andrew R Dykstra Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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