R2.17 - recommendations: empathy as pragmatic skill again

[jvcasillas]

p. 29, line 28 - "This is taken as evidence suggesting that pragmatic skill can modulate the rate of development in L2 prosody.” again, I don’t see a reason to call this pragmatic skill. It’s just empathy. better to say - "That is to say, higher empathy individuals may develop L2 prosody at an earlier stage than lower empathy individuals.”

Action: yeah, ok. See https://github.com/RAP-group/empathy_intonation_perc/issues/57, https://github.com/RAP-group/empathy_intonation_perc/issues/55, and https://github.com/RAP-group/empathy_intonation_perc/issues/46

[jvcasillas]

@juanjgarridop this reviewer harps of the idea that empathy is a pragmatic skill. Im not particularly tied to this idea (she/he says we should just say empathy), but we are following previous research. Could you take a look at the D'imperio studies and see what they have to say about empathy as a pragmatic skill (what, if anything are we missing? what can we add?)? The relevant articles/posters are the following:

• esteve-gibert_2020.pdf
• esteve-gibert_etal_2016.pdf
• orrico_dimperio_2020.pdf
• orrico_etal_2019.pdf (maybe)

They all live in docs/lit/

[juanjgarridop]

The reviewer is right, but so are we. Some studies treat empathy as a pragmatic skill and others treat it as a cognitive skill that affects pragmatic abilities. For example,

Orrico & Dimperio (2020) regards empathy as a cognitive skill related to pragmatic abilities rather than a pragmatic skill itself. They mention: -"listeners’ Empathy Quotient (EQ) score (i.e., a cognitive skill related to pragmatic abilities)" -"...as a function of listener-specific characteristics at both social (exposure to other systems) and cognitive (degree of empathy) levels. -"Empathy—a cognitive variable—"

Esteve Gibert et al. (2016) uses the term "emphatic skills" to refer to the degree of empathy.

HOWEVER

Esteve Gibert et al. (2020) treats empathy as a pragmatic skill. They mention: -"Listeners with better pragmatic skills (higher empathy) were sensitive to intonation cues ." -"Less pragmatically skilled listeners" (to refer to lower empathy individuals) -"our results call for taking into account individual pragmatic differences" (to refer to differences in empathy levels) -"we explore another potential source of individual differences in utterance interpretation: pragmatic abilities, and more specifically, empathy," -"Empathy is part of the set of pragmatic abilities that is generally known as theory of mind (ToM), mindreading, mentalizing, or perspective-taking (Baron-Cohen, 2011; Carruthers, 2009; Frith & Frith, 2003). Researchers have traditionally categorized two dimensions of empathy that in practice are tightly related and sometimes difficult to distinguish: affective empathy (to be emotionally aligned with the interlocutor) and cognitive empathy (to recognize and understand what an interlocutor feels or thinks; Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004; Shamay-Tsoory, Aharon-Peretz, & Perry, 2009; Zaki & Ochsner, 2012)." -"Empathy is part of the set of pragmatic abilities that enable listeners to understand the communicative intentions and feelings behind the interlocutor’s words (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2004)."

I checked some of the references that Esteve Gibert et al. (2020) cite in the last two quotes above and they do NOT really frame empathy as a pragmatic skill. They talk about it as a cognitive skill. I think we should follow what the reviewer suggests and just say 'empathy' and treat it as a cognitive skill that affects/modulates pragmatic abilities and the ability to understand pragmatic meaning. If we try to defend the claim that empathy is a pragmatic skill, we can quote Esteve Gibert et al. (2020) because they state that it is part of the set of pragmatic abilities of theory of mind. We might be able to get away with it, but I really think framing it as a cognitive skill is more accurate.

[juanjgarridop]

So the reviewer mentions our sentence on pg. 29, line 28: "This is taken as evidence suggesting that pragmatic skill can modulate the rate of development in L2 prosody.” We can change it to the sentence the reviewer suggested or we can say: "This is taken as evidence suggesting that the level of empathy can modulate the rate of development in L2 prosody, with higher empathy individuals developing L2 prosody earlier than lower empathy individuals.”

[jvcasillas]

This is very helpful. Im different honestly, but I agree it seems more accurate to operationalize it as a cognitive skill. Luckily this has nothing to do with our preregistration and it will likely make the reviewer happy if we agree with them. The issue is that we talk about pragmatic skill a lot, so we will have to find all of those instances, mainly in the intro and discussion, and rewrite them.

[juanjgarridop]

We could also stick to our original claim and use Esteve Gibert et al. (2020) to back up the claim that empathy is a pragmatic skill. I think we could try and if they still have a problem with it, we change it.

[jvcasillas]

Ill look through the draft again and see how much we would have to change. If it's not too much we can just do it. If it is going to be a huge pain, then we can justify it with Esteve Gibert et al.

[juanjgarridop]

I have looked through the manuscript we submitted (the one in the submissions folder), and we do talk about empathy as a pragmatic skill a lot. I think it will be a pain to change all of that. It will be easier to just justify it with Esteve Gibert et al.

Also in issue #57 the reviewer says, "Given what the study does, I’m not sure you have to say anything about pragmatic skills at all, you can just call it empathy". He not only claims that empathy is NOT a pragmatic skill, but also that we do not have to say anything about pragmatic skills at all, which will imply significant changes in our manuscript and the basis of our study. If we give in to the idea that empathy is not a pragmatic skill, the reviewer might push even more on this.

[jvcasillas]

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

As mentioned previously, this issue is addressed HERE. In this particular instance, we have opted to replace "pragmatic skill" with "empathy" in the revised manuscript.