jvcasillas
commented
1 year ago We thank the reviewer for this comment.
Given that there is no research that we know of regarding empathy and L2 perceptual development, our motivation is based solely on findings from studies on monolinguals.
The logic is the following.
Recent studies related to monolingual sentence processing finds that empathy influences speech perception [@esteve2016role; @esteve2020empathy; @orrico2020individual].
This line of work operationalizes the construct empathy as a pragmatic skill and has focused on it as a source of individual differences.
To elaborate on just one example, @esteve2020empathy shows that listeners with different levels of empathy interpret intonation and meaning in contexts in which a temporary lexical ambiguity could only be resolved through intonation.
The higher empathy group was more sensitive to intonation cues in the process of forming sound-meaning associations.
In other words they used intonation to resolve temporary lexical ambiguities.
As mentioned, there is limited research in SLA involving empathy, and there are no studies, as far as we know, dealing with empathy and speech perception.
That being said, if empathy plays a role in monolingual sentence processing, a valid question is to ask if this is also the case in second language sentence processing.
We have tried to make this clear in the revised manuscript and include below a relevant section illustrating the logic explained above.
The particular body of work linking empathy with SLA has focused on speech production, or, more specifically, on what early scholars considered 'authentic pronunciation' and, more recently, 'pronunciation aptitude' [See @rota2009cognitive], though no strong associations have been found. To the best of our knowledge, no studies have explored the construct empathy as it pertains to L2 perceptual development. Thus, at this time we do not know if empathy plays a role in L2 sentence processing in a similar manner to monolingual sentence processing. The present project extends this research to the SLA context to determine if individual differences in this pragmatic skill affect the development of intonation in L2 perception and sentence comprehension.
With regard to research question 3, our hypothesis that learners will have more difficulty with the Cuban variety is grounded in our pilot data with monolingual Spanish speakers.
We found that participants were much less accurate in the 2afc task when responding to the stimuli provided by the Cuban speaker (and to a lesser extent the Puerto Rican speaker).
A priori we would have had no justification for this hypothesis had we not collected the pilot data.
In hindsight, it would have made sense to pre-register a hypothesis stating that participants would be more accurate responding to speakers of varieties with which they were more familiar.
However, we would not have been able to answer this question--at least not to the extent one would hope---as the listeners in the data we collected mainly stated being most familiar with U.S. Spanish (See pp. 32-33 for brief discussion).
We now offer an additional plausible explanation based on familiarity with Spanish.
Specifically, we analyzed the data from the participants who claimed to be most familiar with a Spanish variety that was included in our speaker varieties (Peninsular and Mexican Spanish).
We coded the participants' responses to familiar versus unfamiliar varieties and fit a Bayesian logistic regression model to the data (complete details provided in the manuscript).
In short, we find that, marginalizing over proficiency and empathy, participants were indeed more accurate when responding to a familiar variety.
This is true for all utterance types to some degree, but more clearly the case for questions (likely because responses to declarative utterances were near ceiling).
Figure \@ref(fig:plot-learner-variety-familiarity) and Table \@ref(tab:table-learner-variety-familiarity-conditional-effects) below illustrate the familiarity effect and are now included in the discussion section and supplementary materials.
\clearpage
(ref:plot-learner-variety-familiarity) Response accuracy as a function of utterance type for unfamiliar and familiar Spanish varieties. Values represent posterior medians along with the 95% HDI for unfamiliar and familiar conditions (left panel), as well as the posterior difference (familiar - unfamiliar; right panel). The posterior predictive distribution is based on data from participants who claimed to be familiar with Mexican (n = r familiarity$Mexico$n_v) and Peninsular (n = r familiarity$Spain$n_v) Spanish.
knitr::include_graphics(here("figs", "manuscript", "learner_variety_familiarity.pdf"))read_csv(here("tables", "learner_variety_match_response_cond_effects.csv")) %>%
knitr::kable(format = "pandoc", align = c("l", "r", "r", "r"),
caption = glue::glue("Conditional effects of response accuracy as a
function of sentence type and familiarity with the Spanish variety.
Values represent posterior medians along with the 95% HDI for unfamiliar
and familiar conditions, along with the posterior difference
(familiar - unfamiliar). The posterior predictive distribution is based on
data from participants who claimed to be familiar with Mexican
(n = {familiarity$Mexico$n_v}) and Peninsular
(n = {familiarity$Spain$n_v}) Spanish."),
label = "table-learner-variety-familiarity-conditional-effects")Finally, we have expanded on the motivation for our hypothesis in the revised manuscript and also included our exploratory analyses of the pilot data in the discussion section and the supplementary materials. This was the only motivation for this hypothesis and precisely what was preregistered prior to collecting any data. Copied below is the relevant change to the introduction.
Finally, with regard to RQ3, we hypothesize that, overall, L2 learners will have the most difficulty (lower accuracy, slower response time) with the Cuban variety. This hypothesis is grounded in exploratory analyses of pilot data collected from
r n_nativesmonolingual Spanish speakers (See Supplementary Materials for more information).
Action: Add after RQs are described