Comparing Iconicity Trade-Offs in Cena and Libras during a Sign Language Production Task
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Se the attached file.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment. We thank both reviewers for their invaluable comments in helping us improve our greatly revised manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for your interesting study.
To me, the most interesting result concerns the non-iconic but ease-of-articulation driven use of orientation in Cena signers.
The preference for simultaneity in motion events in both Cena and Libras signers was also interesting.
I guess the similar handshape complexity, that is a predominance of articulatorily simpler selected fingers and joints, seems to be expected (due to the nature of the referent) while the effect of assimilation for the more complex handshapes is an interesting observation. Would it be possible for you to mention what the syntactic and phonological environments are like in simple handshapes, with no assimilation?
Overall, I find your paper to be strong from a theoretical perspective but I wish you could be able to report results with more of the data you elicited. The transitive data would be particularly interesting for having a more comprehensive idea about finger and joint complexity but it is understanbale if it is not possible to do so.
The handshapes did not print as handshapes but symbols in the pdf. Also, reference to some of the tables and figures included an error.
Thanks again for your interesting study.
Author Response
Please see the attachment. We thank both reviewers for their invaluable comments in helping us improve our greatly revised manuscript.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments to
Comparing iconicity trade-offs in Cena and Libras during a production task v.2
Thank you very for much for the detailed comments to my questions and comments! I think the paper has improved considerably. I have a few minor comments.
There are still a number of handshape symbols in the text: lines 118, 153, 154, 747, 750, 752, 754, 773, 774, 776, 781, 788, 800. I suggest that you make an appendix with a list of the handshape symbols and photos.
Although it is much easier to follow the explanation of Brentari et al.’s model, I still find it hard to understand lines 189-193.
”Handshapes with medium complexity are those which have a single non-radial finger extended, i.e. the middle, ring, or pinky finger.”: It is very hard to extend only the ring finger. How can that be a handshape of medium complexity?
“Additionally, those which have two selected fingers, as opposed to one in the case of low complexity.”: This is not a sentence. Moreover, are “those which have two selected fingers” of medium complexity? “as opposed to one”: In the preceding sentence you wrote that handshapes “which have a single non-radial finger extended” are of medium complexity??? In Table 1, there are handshapes with one and two fingers extended listed as medium.
192-193: What is “one additional feature specification”? One additional finger?
- 6 below Table 1: I suspect that the numbers “(1)”, “(2)” etc. are meant to indicate some sort of list form, but they are placed at the end of the sentences, and the list is not very clear. They may confuse the reader as references to examples or whatever. You might make a proper list, or move the numbers to the beginning of the relevant sentences: “… as follows. 1. Fully open and closed handshapes… 2. Flat and spread handshapes receive a higher score. Flat handshapes are formed… 3. Curved and bent…”
205: “successively flexed”: Do you mean “differently flexed”? “Flexed in different joints”?
In the tables from Table 3 onwards, I think you should substitute Proportion for Frequency. Frequency is a matter of either type or token frequency in texts, but what you are talking about here is the proportion of e.g. the first handshape out of all entity classifier handshapes used for the bottle stimuli, i.e. 15/44 = 0.34. You might even write “0.34 (15/44)”.
Author Response
We thank the reviewer for another round of helpful comments and suggestions in helping to improve our manuscript. We attach a document here with our responses.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
