R1.6 - intro: why empathy re: processing

[jvcasillas]

Also, why empathy should play a role in how these specific sentence types are perceived and processed? Why do the authors think that the listeners’ ability to feel/think what the other feel/think may impact in distinguishing questions from statements? In other words: what are the intonational cues in a declarative or in a yes/no question that may lead to distinct processing accuracy and speech by listeners with distinct empathy skills? Please motivate these aspects further.

Action: check D'Imperio studies for clearer motivation examples

[IvanAndreuRascon]

From the listener’s perspective empathy critical tool as it allows one to understand the intentions of others, predict their behavior and understand others’ emotions (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). Researchers have described two types of empathy that oftentimes might be difficult to distinguish.

• Affective empathy: to be emotionally aligned with the interlocutor
• Cognitive empathy: to recognize and understand what the interlocutor feels or thinks. Empathy is a necessary element when an individual seeks to understand and interact with its interlocutors in contexts were literal and nonliteral meaning.

When we apply this to everyday communication and real words environments, we find that speakers’ expressions and feelings cannot be only limited to lexical or semantic cues. Speakers also make use of other strategies such as intonational cues with the intention to produce a meaningful expression that might include pragmatic connotations, mental states among other meaningful expressions.

Speakers can signal pragmatic information by modifying their pitch accents. High tones at the end of a phrase signal a yes-no question, the same way as a final high tone preceded by a rising pitch accent supports unexpected information in Spanish. Individuals with higher empathy (greater pragmatic skills) would better process 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)

Bishop, J. (2016). Individual differences in top-down and bottom-up prominence perception. Proceedings of Speech Prosody, 2016, 668–672. Bishop, J., Chong, A., & Jun, S.-A. (2015, August). Individual differences in prosodic strategies to sentence parsing. Paper presented at the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, Scotland. Bishop, J., & Kuo, G. (2016, July). Do “autistic-like” personality traits predict prosody perception? Talk presented at LabPhon15 Satellite Workshop on Personality in Speech Perception and Production, Ithaca, NY. Diehl, J. J., Bennetto, L., Watson, D., Gunlogson, C., & McDonough, J. (2008). Resolving ambiguity: A psycholinguistic approach to understanding prosody processing in high-functioning autism. Brain and Language, 106(2), 144–152.

Esteve-Gibert, N., Schafer, A. J., Hemforth, B., Portes, C., Pozniak, C., & D’Imperio, M. (2020). Empathy influences how listeners interpret intonation and meaning when words are ambiguous. Memory & Cognition, 48, 566–580

[jvcasillas]

@IvanAndreu can you make it clear what the above information is (i.e., quoted text, proposed changes, notes, etc.)?

[IvanAndreuRascon]

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

[jvcasillas]

Sigo sin entender. ¿Lo que has escrito arriba son tus propias palabras? No dejas claro cómo ni dónde se podría incorporar el texto en el artículo. Puedes separar lo que es para el reviewer y lo que es para el artículo? No puede valer para ambas cosas.

[IvanAndreuRascon]

Si, son mis palabras, creo que

""From the listener’s perspective empathy critical tool as it allows one to understand the intentions of others, predict their behavior and understand others’ emotions (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004). Researchers have described two types of empathy that oftentimes might be difficult to distinguish.

-Affective empathy: to be emotionally aligned with the interlocutor -Cognitive empathy: to recognize and understand what the interlocutor feels or thinks. Empathy is a necessary element when an individual seeks to understand and interact with its interlocutors in contexts were literal and nonliteral meaning."

Se podria añadir en p10 despues de "Importantly, in recent years empathy has served as a proxy for investigating individual pragmatic skill"

Y

"When we apply this to everyday communication and real words environments, we find that speakers’ expressions and feelings cannot be only limited to lexical or semantic cues. Speakers also make use of other strategies such as intonational cues with the intention to produce a meaningful expression that might include pragmatic connotations, mental states among other meaningful expressions.

Speakers can signal pragmatic information by modifying their pitch accents. High tones at the end of a phrase signal a yes-no question, the same way as a final high tone preceded by a rising pitch accent supports unexpected information in Spanish. Individuals with higher empathy , those with greater pragmatic skills would better process 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)"

Se podria añadir también en pagina 10 antes de "This research underscores" para asi intentar responde a los comentarios del reviewer.

[jvcasillas]

Genial tío. Gracias.

[jvcasillas]

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

These are excellent questions. We appreciate the reviewer's critical eye in pointing out these missing elements in our motivation of empathy. We have included more information in the introduction to address these points. The basic idea proceeds as follows. From the perspective of the listener, empathy is likely critical because it allows one to understand the intentions of others, predict their behavior, and understand their emotions [@baron2004empathy]. Researchers that work on this construct have described two types of empathy that oftentimes might be difficult to distinguish. Affective empathy represents one's ability to be emotionally aligned with the interlocutor and cognitive empathy refers to recognizing and understanding the feelings and thoughts of an interlocutor. Thus, we believe empathy, to some degree, is a necessary element when an individual seeks to understand and interact with its interlocutors.

When we apply this to everyday communication, we find that speakers' expressions and feelings cannot be limited to only lexical or semantic cues. Speakers employ other strategies, such as using intonational cues, with the intention of producing a meaningful expressions that can include pragmatic connotations, and mental states, among other meaningful expressions. For instance, speakers can signal pragmatic information via pitch accents. A high tone at the end of a phrase can signal a yes/no question the same way as a final high tone preceded by a rising pitch accent can indicate unexpected information (in Spanish). The extant literature suggests that individual pragmatic skills modulate intonation processing [@bishop2016individual; @bishop2015individual; @bishop2016autistic; @diehl2008resolving] The critical studies in the case that concerns us are @esteve2016role, @esteve2020empathy, and @orrico2020individual, which suggest that individuals with higher empathy (operationalized as a pragmatic skill) may be better at processing intonation-meaning associations.

Importantly, why and how particular acoustic cues lead to distinct processing outcomes on the part of the listener is still unclear. A priori, one would have reason to believe that the effects of empathy on processing intonation-meaning associations would be present across the board, i.e., for any utterance type. In our data, we find that higher empathy is moderately associated with higher accuracy (holding proficiency constant) for all utterance types, with the exception of yes/no questions. Importantly, this also happens to be the most difficult utterance condition in our data---and that of @bustin_2020---as well as the condition for which the listeners show the least sensitivity (See d' analysis in the supplementary materials). At this juncture, our focus is on expanding this line of research in two ways: (1) to individuals with different linguistic experience (specifically, second language learners), and (2) to different communicative situations (utterance types). We are not concerned (yet) with understanding why different pitch contours affect intonation perception, particularly with regard to the role of empathy, because there is inherent variability in how speakers realize their communicative intentions, at the variety-level and at the individual-level, within utterance types. This variability is present in our stimuli. We believe a fruitful avenue for future research is to explore why and how particular acoustic realizations of pitch within utterance types lead to distinct processing outcomes.

In the revised manuscript we have expanded on these issues in both the introduction and the discussion sections. We do not copy the revised text here due to excessive length, but we direct the reviewer's attention to approximately p. 10, and p. 37.