juanjgarridop
commented
2 years ago I understand that empathy may not be a pragmatic skill but rather a cognitive skill that affects pragmatic reasoning, but to claim that we don't have to say anything about pragmatic skills is not accurate, in my opinion. Reviewer 2 is going too far with this.
We can say something like:
The reviewer's comment touches on two important aspects: (1) whether or not empathy is a pragmatic skill itself and (2) whether our study has anything to do with pragmatic skills at all. First, empathy has previously been treated as a pragmatic skill in recent studies. Esteve Gibert et al. (2020) explain that empathy is part of the set of pragmatic abilities known as theory of mind, and they add that empathy is one of the pragmatic skills that enable listeners to understand the communicative intentions encoded in the interlocutor's words. Esteve Gibert et al. (2020) found that listeners with better pragmatic skills (i.e., higher empathy) are more sensitive to intonation cues when forming sound-meaning associations and using intonation to disambiguate meaning. Our study takes Esteve Gibert et al. (2020) as a starting point and builds upon their findings. Therefore, we follow the previous literature that regards empathy as a pragmatic skill. Second, regardless of whether empathy is a pragmatic skill itself or an ability that helps pragmatic skills/pragmatic reasoning, as the reviewer suggests, our study does relate to how pragmatic skills are used to interpret meaning through intonation, thus a discussion about pragmatic skills is still crucial to the study. As we discuss in the manuscript, previous research has reported that speakers make use of intonational cues of speech to express pragmatic meaning, mental states, among others, and to structure information in speech (see Esteve Gibert, 2020; Ladd, 2008; Prieto, 2015). In our experimental task, participants were required to decide whether the utterances they listened to were questions or statements solely on the basis of the intonation they perceived, which directly taps into their pragmatic abilities (including empathy). According to Esteve Gibert et al. (2020), empathy is a pragmatic skill that allows listeners to interpret the intentions behind the interlocutor's message, which is exactly the focus of our study.
jvcasillas
Action: good points, think about this and make decisions, refer to previous D'Imperio literature (see also https://github.com/RAP-group/empathy_intonation_perc/issues/55 and https://github.com/RAP-group/empathy_intonation_perc/issues/46)