R1.11 - results: relate findings to previous lit

[jvcasillas]

Results show that proficiency and empathy interact in wh-questions but not in yes/no questions or declaratives, and that empathy had an effect in all sentence types except for yes/no question. There is no discussion on how these findings relate to previous literature on sentence comprehension, or even on what may originate these differences across sentence types. Instead, the discussion and conclusion now seem to mask these differences across sentence types.

Action: think, add detail to discussion

[jvcasillas]

@juanjgarridop Am I crazy or is our discussion literally about how these findings relate to previous lit on sentence comprehension (the brandl et al study and Esteve et al, for instance)? @juanjgarridop @kparrish92 can you think of anything else here?

[juanjgarridop]

The discussion talks a lot about how the findings relate to previous findings. I think the reviewer wants us to talk more about the difference in the effects on wh-questions and yes/no questions? We mentioned that yes/no questions were more difficult than wh-questions, and that this is in line with Brandl et al, but maybe we could try to speculate about why yes/no questions were more difficult and why yes/no questions are not really affected by empathy?

Probably Yes/No questions were more difficult because wh-questions include a wh-word, so there is a possible lexical cue that facilitates interpretation of a wh-question in addition to intonation. Yes/No questions on the other hand have the same syntactic structure as a declarative statement at first glance, and therefore require more effort and attention to intonation to distinguish from statements.

We still have to explain why empathy affected responses to wh-questions, but not yes/no questions. I saw in issue #25 that wh-questions apart from the propositional content, imply presupposition, but a y/n question does not. Perhaps more pragmatically complex utterances are more difficult to map to intonation. We could use this to say that empathy plays a role for disambiguating the more complex structure, but I feel like this contradicts what I wrote above.

Yes/No questions are more difficult because decisions are made solely on intonation, and there is no additional lexical cue? Empathy matters more for Wh questions because wh questions imply a presupposition and are pragmatically more complex? but why was the more complex structure easier for the participants?

I'll try to think of something else.

[jvcasillas]

Included via https://github.com/RAP-group/empathy_intonation_perc/pull/76

In the revised manuscript we have focused our discussion on what we believe to be the most relevant studies with regard to sentence comprehension and empathy. We have also expanded our discussion concerning why we don't find an effect for empathy with regard to yes/no questions. Of particular interest to the reviewer are pages 31-33. For convenience, we include relevant excerpts below.

In line with previous studies [e.g., @bustin_2020], we found that yes/no questions were most difficult for L2 learners of Spanish, followed by wh- questions and broad focus and narrow focus statements. An exploratory analysis using d' found that learner sensitivity to the utterance types followed the same pattern. While it is not clear exactly why yes/no question are the most difficult, one possibility is that wh- questions pose less of a challenge because they contain a wh- word (e.g., cuándo, cómo, etc.). In other words, it might be the presence of a lexical cue in our task [and that of @bustin_2020] that facilitates the interpretation of a wh- question in addition to intonation. At this juncture this possibility cannot be discarded, though it is worth noting that the presence of these words alone does not imply a question. That is to say, in specific contexts these same words appear in statements as well, e.g., Que bebe María, Que beba María, etc. A specific intonation contour is obligatory to force a question interpretation. Moreover, apart from the propositional content, a wh- question also implies a presupposition, and, thus, is more pragmatically complex. On the other hand, the yes/no questions in our experimental task have the same syntactic structure as the declarative statements. Perhaps for this reason yes/no questions require more effort and attention to intonation in order to distinguish them from statements in our task.

As well as...

Additionally, our study addressed the question Do pragmatic skills---specifically, empathy---modulate the rate of development in L2 prosody? This question was motivated by a line of research showing that empathy influences language processing in monolingual populations [@esteve2016role; @esteve2020empathy; @orrico2020individual]. Though the construct empathy has been considered in the SLA literature, the current body of research is limited to studies on pronunciation accuracy [i.e., @guiora1972empathy; @rota2009cognitive, among others]. Thus, we extend research on empathy to L2 phonological acquisition as it relates to speech perception. Using a cross-sectional design, we show (1) that empathy, as measured by the empathy quotient [@baron2004empathy], did indeed modulate response accuracy and the decision-making process, and (2) how empathy affected sentence processing was related to L2 proficiency. Specifically, we found response accuracy increased as a function of proficiency, independent of empathy for yes/no questions, but not wh- questions. In the case of the latter, we found empathy to have a compounding effect on the correlation between accuracy and proficiency, such that higher empathy individuals showed more accuracy at lower proficiency levels when compared with their lower empathy counterparts. This is taken as evidence suggesting that pragmatic skill can modulate the rate of development in L2 prosody. That is to say, higher empathy individuals may develop L2 prosody at an earlier stage than lower empathy individuals. That being said, we do not find the same effect with yes/no questions. This finding is quite puzzling, particularly because previous research on sentence processing has found an effect for empathy in yes/no questions, e.g., in Salerno Italian [@orrico2020individual]. At this time, we are uncertain as to why our results differ in this regard, though the nature of the outcome variable measured in the task used in @orrico2020individual (certainty scores bounded at 0 and 100) may have provided a more fine-grained window into the effect of empathy.