R2.15 - recommendations: explain perceptual learning in context

[jvcasillas]

p. 15, line 25 - I’m wondering what perceptual learning would mean here. We know that the encoding of narrow focus and question intonation differs across the varieties that are listed here. How would we know if these participants had experience with these varieties? It would be helpful to know what the tunes for each type of sentence were for each variety used in the stimuli as well.

Action: need to think about this and possibly add a sentence or two

[nmrodriguez]

I assume that we're taking the perspective that perceptual learning has come from the varieties of Spanish that these participants were exposed to. We would make the argument that through exposure to these varieties, they are familiar with the intonation pattern of that language, but do we want to go as far as to say they have learned the intonation patterns of that variety? If we do, we could write something like:

In the context of this project, we operationalize perceptual learning as the exposure and familiarity that the participants have with a variety of Spanish. And another sentence here?

Also: we have information in the supplementary materials about what varieties the participants are exposed to in the task, but we don't have a table or anything in the paper that shows the results to the questions "Additionally, participants responded to the prompt “I am most familiar with Spanish from...” and using a pull- down window they selected a variety of Spanish or “I am not familiar with any variety of Spanish”. I could explore the data set and make a figure if you don't have one for this. (I also could be just missing it in the paper/in the repo).

[jvcasillas]

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

In the context of our study and specifically with regard to the two-alternative forced-choice task, perceptual learning is inferred via increased response accuracy and reduced reaction times (increased processing speed) as a function of proficiency and empathy. In hindsight, we see that we did not intend to refer to learning in this sentence. Importantly, with the data we have collected we do not (and cannot) go as far as to assume that participants have learned all of the specific tunes related to the utterance types produced by the 8 Spanish speakers. Instead, we focus on the participants' ability to comprehend the intended pragmatic meanings of the stimuli they have heard. To the reviewer's point, we have provided more detailed information about the stimuli used in this task and revised the relevant sentence in the prose. Specifically, we avoid talking about learning and now say 'intonation processing'. In context, the sentence in its entirety reads as follows:

Our hypothesis related to empathy as a possible mediator of intonation processing is exploratory in nature; therefore, we did not base our sample size estimate on any parameter estimates related to this effect.