Nagaraj, JASA-EL
Responses to Reviewer Comments Manuscript #EL-15-2639
Please find below authors’ responses to reviewer comments. In addition, the
reviewer edits on the document PDF have also been made to improve the
manuscript.
Reviewer #2 (Comments to the Author):
Reviewer Comment: How many sentences are used per condition? The text is
unclear for me to understand this well. There are in total 48? sentences
available, divided over 4 conditions and some training sentences? So, there are
maybe 10 sentences left per condition? If this calculation is correct, are enough
sentences used to test a condition? Could you comment on the learning effects
during the test?
Reviewer Comment: What kind off feedback was applied during training, how
many sentences were used (during training), and were sentences used more
than once?
Author Response: 12 sentences were used per condition with a total of 60 key
words per condition. Practice trials included a separate set of 12 sentences per
condition. Feedback was provided only on practice trials. The accurate sentence
was played without interruption as feedback after the subject’s response. Given
that scoring was based on recognition of the key words, a maximum score of 60
per condition provided adequate data points. Speech intelligibility and WM data
for each condition were normally distributed with no influential cases. Also, no
sentences were repeated during the experiment. QuickSIN sentences are
standardized auditory test material and are designed to have limited contextual
cues.
Reviewer Comment: Signal processing and interruptions: why are the
sentences band-pass filtered (300-3300 Hz) and what does the combined
interrupted sentences mean (2 and 8 Hz interruptions at the same time?)
Author Response: Filtering was done for two reasons. The first was to simulate
telephone broadband signals. This simulation was intended to provide an
ecologically valid listening scenario. Second, the filtering was done to increase
task difficulty in order to ensure that higher order cognitive systems were taxed
during performance. The combined interruption condition included both 2 and 8
Hz interruptions concurrently. Please see Figure 1 for illustration of the
interruption conditions.
Reviewer Comment: A more detailed description on the RSPAN and the
OSPAN would be welcome
Nagaraj, JASA-EL
Author Response: Detailed description of both WM tasks has now been
included in the method section.
Reviewer Comment: "Even though the Benard study did not measure WM
capacity,.."
This is not correct. WM was measured in this study as it is one of the four major
components of the composite WAIS test. However, Benard et al. did not find a
correlation between WM and interrupted speech.
Author Response: Yes, we agree. Please find this rectified in the manuscript.
Reviewer Comment: The author names are not always correctly written:
Baskent with an S or without the T, and Bernard instead of Benard.
Author Response: Yes. Please find this rectified throughout the manuscript.
Reviewer #3 (Comments to the Author):
Reviewer Comment: The study addresses an important aspect of speech
perception. The essential question might be: Is the verbal working memory
independent of top-down mechanisms engaged in speech comprehension or
not? Is the authors' dichotomy into attention control and WM mechanisms, on the
one hand, and linguistic context integration, on the other, justified?
Author Response: Yes, we agree. Please find this rectified in the manuscript.
The authors restate this as reliance on WM mechanisms during interrupted
speech perception. That is, in the present study the attention control mechanism
of working memory is being measured and is used to examine correlation with
perception of interrupted speech.
Reviewer Comment: I think that the missing correlation between WM size and
speech comprehension does not provide an unambiguous answer. It just
indicates that WM size was not the limiting factor for speech comprehension
under the "interrupted" conditions. However, it might be the case that all subjects
used their working memory for the task, but that the memory load was quite low,
giving rise to a ceiling effect, masking inter-subject differences in WM.
Author Response: We agree, Thank you for insightful comments. Please find
this point added in P.9 “). Another possibility for the lack of association between
WM and interrupted speech perception may be low memory load of the
sentences (5 keywords) used in the present study. Accordingly, WM capacity
may not be the limiting factor leading to a ceiling effect. Reduced memory load
may have been responsible for masking individual differences in WM for
recognizing the interrupted sentences. It may be useful to incorporate passages
level comprehension tasks in the interrupted speech paradigm. Doing this may
Nagaraj, JASA-EL
increase memory load and help better understand the role of WM and linguistic
processing in interrupted speech perception.”
Reviewer Comment: In its present form, the manuscript appears a bit too much
shortened. The speech stimuli could be exemplified by an oscillogram including a
transcription in order to demonstrate the missing speech sounds and the memory
load of the stimuli. Furthermore, some examples should be given of how subjects
managed to restore the missing segments, e.g., regarding syntactic or semantic
priming. The Discussion should also include some considerations about the
"bottleneck" behind the observed inter-subject variability. Apart from context
integration and memory characteristics, this bottleneck might also include other
factors such as acoustic/phonological processing capabilities.
Author Response: Waveform of interrupted speech sentence is now included to
illustrate the missing information for various conditions. Please see Fig 1.
Please see (p, 9) for discussion about acoustic phonetic and contextual factors
influencing interrupted speech perception
Reviewer Comments:
P. 4, line 3 from bottom: I do not understand the relevance of the "Track"
information given here.
P. 5, line 7: "... _was_ measured"
P. 5, line 8 from bottom: remove the word "test"
P. 5, line 6-5 from bottom: "between each speech iterruption rate scores" sounds
a bit strange.
P. 7, line 5 "play_s_ "
Author Response: All minor edits have been made in the manuscript.
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