R1.3 - intro: intonation difficulties

[jvcasillas]

The introduction mentions several times that “intonation may result in comprehension and communication difficulties” and that “interpreting L2 intonation is challenging”, and it feels a bit repetitive. These statements should also be better motivated and better justified (intonation more than other linguistic aspects? which kind of difficulties? what does ‘challenging’ mean? why is it challenging? all intonation patterns work equally?).

Action: check how many times this is said and reduce to one, explain why it is challenging.

[IvanAndreuRascon]

Individuals with higher empathy (greater pragmatic skills) process better intonation-meaning associations. Previous studies have reported an effect of individual pragmatic skills on intonation processing (Bishop, 2016; Bishop & Kuo, 2016; Bishop et al., 2015; Diehl et al., 2008; Jun & Bishop, 2014) Whereas less empathic individuals wait for lexical disambiguation to be presented. (Esteve-Gibert et al.,2020)

From a comprehender’s point of view the usage of this ability allows one to understand and predict intentions, behavior or another sort of nonlinguistic expression. In this sense, when a non-literal cue is presented, it becomes more challenging, as the speaker needs more abilities to obtain meaning. Based on previous research (Esteve-Gibert et al.,2020) its been argued that those individuals with higher empathy (greater pragmatic skills) are able to disambiguate meaning better than those with a weaker empathy quotient. Therefore, for those individuals with lower levels of empathy they will struggle more, or it will be more challenging to understand the communicative intentions and feelings behind the interlocutor’s word

[jvcasillas]

@IvanAndreu just to clarify, is the above text your proposed change?

[IvanAndreuRascon]

Yes, it can be added either to the manuscript and/ or to the reviewer response letter

[jvcasillas]

I'm not sure that this really gets at what the reviewer is referring to. My interpretation is that they are focused on the learning process (not empathy) and why it is difficult in L2 phonological learning. This is what I have come up with.

We thank the reviewer for their suggestion. In the revised manuscript we have reduced the amount of times this point is emphasized to avoid repetition and in the referred text we have avoided describing the learning process as "difficult" or "challenging" because at this juncture of the introduction we are not interested in comparing the relative difficulty of different linguistic elements, nor explaining how different intonation patterns might cause more or less problems. Instead, our aim is illustrate that semantic meaning mapping is language-specific and that L2 learners typically have non-target-like outcomes due to cross-linguistic influence. We believe we have made this point more clear in the revised manuscript. We include the relevant text below for convenience.

This is, in part, because in everyday discourse speakers can use intonation to indicate syntactic structure, to signal whether an utterance is a question or a statement, to focus constituents, as well as to convey affective meaning. Notably, the manner in which intonation is mapped to meaning is often language-specific. As a consequence, L2 intonation is often produced in a non-target-like fashion due to cross-linguistic influence.

Intonation has a semantic function and through adequate cognitive decoding of the signal a listener can interpret the intended meaning of a given utterance. For example, an intonational contour can indicate to a listener whether the utterance of an interlocutor is a question or a statement. As touched upon above, a speaker can use prosody to signal numerous additional pragmatic functions as well. This rich variation in pragmatic uses makes the interpretation and decoding of intonational contours during speech comprehension a non-trivial task for the language learner. Moreover, the use of first language (L1) prosodic features when speaking the target language can result in misunderstandings because the same prosodic features can convey different linguistic and paralinguistic meaning in the target language [@cruz1987; @pickering2001role; @chen2005universal; @mennen2008phonological]. As noted by @levis2016accent, prosody is also "[...] critical for L2 pronunciation because it plays a major role in cementing social bonds as a key marker of social identity" (p. 154).

[jvcasillas]

Included via https://github.com/RAP-group/empathy_intonation_perc/pull/69