英文论文审稿意见汇总_英文论文审稿意见范文

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英文论文审稿意见汇总

以下12点无轻重主次之分。每一点内容由总结性标题和代表性审稿人意见构成。

1、目标和结果不清晰。

It is noted that your manuscript needs careful editing by someone with expertise in technical English editing paying particular attention to English grammar, spelling, and sentence structure so that the goals and results of the study are clear to the reader.2、未解释研究方法或解释不充分。

◆ In general, there is a lack of explanation of replicates and statistical me thods used in the study.◆ Furthermore, an explanation of why the authors did these various experiments should be provided.3、对于研究设计的rationale: Also, there are few explanations of the rationale for the study design.4、夸张地陈述结论/夸大成果/不严谨：

The conclusions are overstated.For example, the study did not show

if the side effects from initial copper burst can be avoid with the polymer formulation.5、对hypothesis的清晰界定：

A hypothesis needs to be presented。

6、对某个概念或工具使用的rationale/定义概念：

What was the rationale for the film/SBF volume ratio?

7、对研究问题的定义：

Try to set the problem discued in this paper in more clear,write one section to define the problem8、如何凸现原创性以及如何充分地写literature review:

The topic is novel but the application proposed is not so novel.9、对claim,如A＞B的证明，verification: There is no experimental comparison of the algorithm with previously known work, so it is impoible to judge whether the algorithm is an improvement on previous work.10、严谨度问题：

MNQ is easier than the primitive PNQS, how to prove that.11、格式（重视程度）：

◆ In addition, the list of references is not in our style.It is close but not completely correct.I have attached a pdf file with “Instructions for Authors” which shows examples.◆ Before submitting a revision be sure that your material is properly prepared and formatted.If you are unsure, please consult the formatting nstructions to authors that are given under the “Instructions and Forms” button in he upper right-hand corner of the screen.12、语言问题（出现最多的问题）： 有关语言的审稿人意见：

◆ It is noted that your manuscript needs careful editing by someone with expertise in technical English editing paying particular attention to English grammar, spelling, and sentence structure so that the goals and results of the study are clear to the reader.◆ The authors must have their work reviewed by a proper translation/reviewing service before submiion;only then can a proper review be performed.Most sentences contain grammatical and/or spelling mistakes or are not complete sentences.◆ As presented, the writing is not acceptable for the journal.There are pro blems with sentence structure, verb tense, and clause construction.◆ The English of your manuscript must be improved before resubmiion.We str ongly suggest that you obtain aistance from a colleague who is well-versed i n English or whose native language is English.◆ Please have someone competent in the English language and the subject matte r of your paper go over the paper and correct it.? ◆ the quality of English needs improving.来自编辑的鼓励：

Encouragement from reviewers: ◆ I would be very glad to re-review the paper in greater depth once it has be en edited because the subject is interesting.◆ There is continued interest in your manuscript titled “……” which you subm itted to the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research: Part BFirst line of Introduction: aromaticity is one of the most important concepts in organic chemistry, but most of organic compounds are not aromatic.-Introduction, line 4: notice that only energetic ways of evaluating aromaticity are mentioned, however geometry-based(HOMA), magnetic-based(NICS)and electronic-based(SCI, PDI)methods are also important, and this point should be pointed out.Enlarge description in point 3.4.1 by going deeper into the data in Figure 8.Review Sent Date: 18-Dec-2006

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The Comments by the Second Reviewer

Editor: Michael A.Duncan Reviewer: 67 Manuscript Number: jp067440i Manuscript Title: Restricted Geometry Optimization, a Different Way to Estimate Stabilization

Energies for Aromatic Molecules of Various Types Corresponding Author: Yu

Recommendation: The paper is probably publishable, but should be reviewed again in revised form before it is accepted.Additional Comments: Comments on the manuscript “Restricted Geometry Optimization, a Different Way to Estimate Stabilization Energies for Aromatic Molecules of Various Types” by Zhong-Heng Yu, Peng Bao Authors propose a restricted geometry optimization technique subject to pi orbital interaction constraints as a new measure of aromaticity.The approach is interesting and has certain merits.My main objection is that the manuscript is difficult to read and understand, mainly because of poor English.A substantial revision in this respect would be beneficiary.各位：

新的恶战开始了。投往JASA的文章没有被拒，但被批得很凶。尽管如此，审稿人和编辑 还是给了我们一个修改和再被审的机会。我们应当珍惜这个机会，不急不火。我们首 先要有个修改的指导思想。大家先看看审稿意见吧。

-----邮件原件-----

Manuscript #07-04147:

Editor's Comments:

This is my personal addition to the automatically generated email displayed above.Your manuscript has now been read by three knowledgeable reviewers, each of whom has provided thoughtful and detailed comments on the paper.The main points of the reviews are self-explanatory and mostly consistent acro the reviews.Your presentation needs to be reworked substantially, and the reviews give you many suggestions for doing so.Clearly, the introduction needs to be much more concise and focused on the main questions you propose to answer, and why these questions are important.The rationale for selecting this unusual condition must be clear.Your discuion should focus on how the questions have been answered and what they mean.The results section is heavily dependent on statistical analyses that did not satisfy the reviewers.The figures and tables could be improved and perhaps consolidated.The methods could be shortened.For example, I think readers would take your word that these were nonsense sentences, or perhaps you could simply cite some other work where they were used.In general, it is unusual to present the first results as late as page 17 of a manuscript.Beyond the iues of presentation, some serious questions are raised by the reviewers about the design.The most notable(but not the only problem)is that there are no conditions where young and older listeners can be compared at nearly the same performance level in the baseline condition, and that at least floor effects and potentially ceiling effects are likely to significantly influence the older/younger comparison.The older listeners are tested at only one signal-to-noise ratio, at which performance was extremely poor.This asymmetric design where data for three signal-to-masker ratios are available for the younger listeners but only one for the older listeners is not ideal, but perhaps the comparison could have been salvaged if you had gueed a little better in selecting the signal-to-masker ratio for the older listeners.That didn't work out and you didn't adjust to it.I'm sorry to say that in my opinion this problem is so serious that it precludes publication of t!he older versus younger data in JASA, as I see no way of making a valid comparison with things as they are.Further, after reading the manuscript and the reviews, it seems to me that even the subjective impreion comparison is difficult to interpret because of the different sensation levels at which the older and younger groups listened(if the target was fixed at 56 dBA).The Brungart et al.and Rakerd et al.data that you cite where the masker delay was manipulated over the 0 to 64 ms range would seem to have been a nice springboard for your study in older listeners.Would it not have been cleaner to have replicated those conditions with younger subjects in your lab, and then tested older listeners to see whether the patterns of data were different? There, at least, the target stimulus condition itself is not varying and there are archival data out there for comparison.As the reviews point out, your conditions present brand new complications because the ITI changes the spatial impreion of the target, may change the energetic masking of the target, and distorts the target temporally all at the same time.Although the temporal distortions did not impair performance substantially in quiet, they may well in noise.Further, the spatial impreions created by the target in quiet are likely to be very different than those when the target is at v!ery low sensation levels in masking.Please investigate the literature on the influence of sensation level and noise on the strength of the precedence effect, particularly the perception of “echoes” at the longer delays.Yuan Chuan Chiang did her diertation on this and published the results in JASA in 1998, but the first observation that noise can influence the breaking apart of a lead-lag stimulus into two images dates back at least to Thurlow and Parks(1961).To be sure, the sounds that we want to listen to are often accompanied by reflections, and I am not questioning the general validity of your conditions.However, it is important that your experimental design allows you separate out the various contributions to your results.I think there are several options for you to consider:(1)If you think it is very important to publish all the data you have right now, you could withdraw the manuscript and attempt to publish the data in another journal.(2)You could argue that the reviewers and I are wrong about the seriousne of the floor effect with the older listeners and submit a revision that includes the same data while making a convincing case for the validity of the older/younger comparison.Although this option is open to you, I don't think this is a promising alternative.(3)You could collect more data on older listeners under more favorable conditions where performance is better.With the added data this could either be a new manuscript, or, if such data were collected and the paper rewritten in a reasonable amount of time, it could be considered a revision of the current manuscript.The revision would be sent back to the reviewers.Of course, I cannot promise in advance that a manuscript even with these new data would be judged favorably by the reviewers.(4)You could drop the older/younger comparison from the manuscript and submit a much shorter version that includes only the younger data and focuses on the noise masker/speech masker distinction, perhaps analyzing your data to draw inferences about release from energetic versus informational masking from the data.Here too, it will be important to provide a clear rationale for what your specific question is about release from masking, why your conditions were chosen, and what new insights your data offer.I still worry about how spatial effects and the effects of temporal distortions are to be distinguished.(5)You could simply withdraw the manuscript and consider a more straightforward design for asking the questions you want to ask with older listeners.Thank your for submitting your manuscript to JASA.I hope the alternatives described will help guide you on how you should proceed from here.Whatever you decide to do, please consider the reviewers' comments very carefully as they have gone out of their way to provide you with suggestions on improving the presentation.Sincerely yours，Richard L.Freyman

Reviewer Comments: Reviewer #1 Evaluations:

Reviewer #1(Good Scientific Quality):

No.See attached

Reviewer #1(Appropriate Journal):

Yes

Reviewer #1(Satisfactory English/References):

No.Reviewer #1(Tables/Figures Adequate):

No.Reviewer #1(Concise):

No.Reviewer #1(Appropriate Title and Abstract):

No, because the term “interval-target interval” in the title required further explanation.MS#: 07-04147

Huang et al.“Effect of changing the inter-target interval on informational masking and energetic masking of speech in young adults and older adults.” This paper investigates the benefits of release from masking in younger and older listeners, as a function of inter-target interval(ITI)in two masker conditions(speech masking and noise masker).The same target speech was presented from two different locations simultaneously in two different maskers, one from each location(L or R).Results show that release from informational masking is evident in both younger and older listeners when the ITI was reduced from 64 ms to 0 ms.General comments:

1.Introduction needs to be rewritten:

• The general impreion is that the introduction section is unnecearily lengthy.There is too much unneceary information, while some important terms and information are left unexplained.• The organization is poor and concepts are disjointed, jumping from place to place.For example, the authors spent 1.5 pages on reverberation and the difference between older and younger adults, than spent a full-page to talk about masking, and then came back to reverberation.• In addition, the authors did not clearly present the purpose of the study and the core of the iues under investigation.The authors mentioned that “the present study investigated whether changing the ITI over the whole precedence-operation range...can induce a release of target speech from speech masking or noise masking.” However, they did not explain how and why manipulating ITI can addre their questions, questions that were not clearly stated anywhere in the paper.No hypothesis was provided in the paper and no explanation was given regarding how the experimental conditions or contrast of results in different conditions can answer the questions under investigation.2.Report of results and statistical analyses needs to be accurate and precise:

• Authors failed to provide results of statistical analyses in many occasions.• At the beginning of the result section for both the younger and older groups, the authors should clearly present the number of factors included in the analysis and which one was a between-subject factor and which ones were within-subject factors.Main effects and interaction(3-way and 2-way)should also be reported clearly.• Bonferroni correction was mentioned in the post-hoc analyses;however, no pvalue was reported.• The authors should not use the term “marginally significant”.It is either

“significant” or “nonsignificant”.I don't see p=0.084 is “marginally significant.”

• When you say percent release, do you mean percentage point difference between

the 64 ms ITI and other ITI values? For example, in the statement “...the release

amount was 31.9% under the speech-masking condition,...”, do you mean “31.9 percentage points”?

3.Baseline condition is questionable:

• The authors failed to provide clear explanation of the results.For example, the authors finally provided the definition of release from masking(on p.19)as

“...the release of speech from masking at each ITI is defined as the percent difference between the speech-identification at the ITI and the speech identification at the ITI of 64 ms(the longest ITI in this study).”

• It took me a while to understand what this means, and finally came up with the interpretation(if my interpretation is correct)of the data for the authors.It seems that when ITI was at 0 ms, the perceived spatial location is between the two maskers(spatial separation).But when the ITI was 32 and/or 64 ms, listeners heard two images(one from each side)and there was no spatial separation between the target speech and the masker on either side.Therefore, according to the authors, the release from masking is the performance difference between the ITI conditions when listeners heard only one image in a location different from the maskers', and the ITI conditions where two images from the masker locations were heard.However, I have a problem with the baseline condition(64 ms ITI in which two images were perceived).If the listeners could not fuse the image, did they hear a delay(echo)between the two targets? If so, the poor performance in the 64 ms condition can be partially due to the confusion/disruption induced by the echo in noise conditions in addition to the lack of spatial separation between the target and the masker.4.Subject recruitment criteria were unclear:

• The authors recruited both young and older adults in the study and claimed that both groups had “clinically normal hearing.” However, reading the fine details of their hearing thresholds(

5.Language problem:

• I understand that English is not the authors' native language.It is recommended that the authors seek aistance in proof-reading the manuscript before submiion.6.Tables and Figures:

• Table 1 and 2 are not neceary since the information is presented in Fig.7

• The authors should provide legends in the figures.• The authors should provide error bars in the graphs in Fig 1.• It is hard to see the short ITI data in Fig.2

• The authors should consider changing the scale on the y-axis in Fig.4 to provide better visualization of the data.• Fig.6 should be deleted.Results could be clearly described in the text.Specific comments(this is by no means a complete list):

p.3 first par: The quote from Knudsen(1929)is not neceary.p.4 first & second par.The authors provided an exhaustive list of references in various place.I recommend they only cite the ones that are most relevant and representative.p.4 last sentence.“A listener subject to informational masking a target speech feels it difficult to segregate audible components of the target speech from those of masking speech.” This sentence is incomprehensible, please rewrite.p.5 first line, first par.“Masking(particularly information masking)of target speech can be reduced if the listener can use certain cues(perceived spatial location, acoustical features, lexical information, etc)to facilitate his/her selective attention to the target

speech.” References are needed for each cue listed in this sentence.p.5 line 5.“Age-related deficits...inhibition of goal-irrelevant information..., therefore may cause more speech-recognition difficulties” This sentence is coming out of the blue without further explanation.p.8-10.Please explain the terms “inter-loudspeaker interval”, “inter-masker interval”, “inter-target interval” before using them.p.11 line 11 “Moreover, if the recognition of target speech under either the speech masking condition or noise masking condition is significantly influenced by the ITI in younger adults, the present study further investigated whether there is an age-related deficit in the releasing effect of changing the ITI.” This sentence is incomprehensible.p.11 line 2 “The 36 young university students all had normal and balanced....” Change “balance” to “symmetrical.”

p.12 line 8 “Direct English translations of the sentences are similar but not identical to the English nonsense sentences that were developed by Helfer(1997)and also used in studies by Freyman et al.(1999, 2001, 2004)and Li et al.(2004).” I thought the sentences were created by the authors.So, are they a direct translation from the English version or created by the authors?

p.13 last par “For the two-source target presentation,....” This came out of the blue.The experimental conditions should be described clearly in a separate section.Schematic representation of the conditions could be included.p.15 line 8 “During a seion, the target-speech sounds were presented at a level such that each loudspeaker, playing alone, would produce a sound preure of 56 dBA.” Is this the rms level of speech? The level at 56 dBA seems a little low to me.It may sound very soft for the older listeners given that they have mild to moderate hearing lo.Can you explain why you chose such a low presentation level?

p.15 last line “There were 36((17+1)x2)testing condition for younger participants, and there were 32((15+1)x2)testing conditions for older participants.” The number of conditions for each group is not apparent to me.Could you explain further in the manuscript?

p.16 line 9 “...participated in additional speech-recognition experiments under the condition without masker presentation.” Where did the target speech come from? Front? Right? Or left? p.17-27.See comments on reporting results and statistical analysis under “General comments” point #2.p.23 line 12-13 “A 2(masker type)by 15(ITI)within-subject ANOVA confirms that the interaction between masker type and ITI was significant...” Since the interaction is significant, the authors should not simply interpret the main effects.p.29 line 9 Explain “self-masking” effect.Would the author expect a “self-masking” effect in noise?

p.30 last par first line “Specifically, when the SNR was-4 dB, changing the ITI(absolute value)from 64 to 0 ms led to only a small improvement in target-speech intelligibility, and the improvement was similar between the speech masking condition and the noise masking condition.” The amount of release from masking in the speech masker condition at-4 dB SNR may be limited by the ceiling effect.p.31 line 5 “In older participants, the reduction of the ITI also improved speech recognition under both the speech masking condition and the noise masking condition...”

It is hard to tell if there is a significant difference among the ITI conditions with the noise masker due to the floor effect.p.31 line 7 from bottom.“The results suggest a faster decay of temporal storage of the fine details of speech sound in older adults than in younger adults.Thus at long it is(16 ms or 32 ms), cues induced by the integration of leading and lagging target signals were weaker and/or not be well used in older participants.” First, the author should take into account the hearing lo in the older group.Second, this conclusion seems somewhat

contradictory to what the authors reported regarding the perceived image(s)of the target signal under various ITI conditions.All except for one younger subject perceived two

separate images at 32 ms ITI, but most of the older subjects still perceived the target as one image.p.32 2nd par.The discuion on the effect of inter-sound delay on ear channel acoustics came out of nowhere.Reviewer #2 Evaluations:

Reviewer #2(Good Scientific Quality):

Generally yeee general remarks.The referencing is occasionally exceive, e.g.the 17 references provided to back up the existence of informational masking on page 4, lines 13-17, or p28 lines 15-16.Some choice examples would generally suffice instead of these long lists of citations(see JASA guidelines).The English is satisfactory, with lots of minor comments(see 'detailed comments' below)

Reviewer #2(Tables/Figures Adequate):

The figures would benefit from being redrawn using appropriate graph-plotting software.In their current form, they are quite pixelated.The figures would benefit from a legend, when there are several symbols used on the same graphs.Figure 2 and Figure 3's x-axes should be suitably non-linear, because the points plotted for ITIs between-10 and 10 ms are illegible.Figure 3 is perhaps largely repeats information that is apparent in Figure 2.Also, the top panel is perhaps misleading, as the difference between the two conditions could be explained to some degree by a ceiling effect.The use of symmetry in Figure 3 should be applied to Figure 2, since we had no reason to expect left-right effects.Tables 1 and 2 should be omitted, since all their information is provided in a Figure.Reviewer #2(Concise):

There seem to be a large number of ANOVAs described in great detail.Perhaps these could be reduced to more eential statistics, or even omitted when the differences are clear from the figures(see 'general remarks' below).Reviewer #2(Appropriate Title and Abstract):

In the title, the term 'inter-target interval' could refer to many things, and it is not immediately obvious from the title that the paper has anything to do with the precedence effect.Reviewer #2(Remarks):

The authors have presented uncorrelated speech or noise maskers from two speakers, and presented the target speech from the same two speakers non-simultaneously, varying the time-interval(the inter-target interval, or ITI)between the two presentations.(1)Young listeners' speech-recognition: Novel differences were mentioned between the design of your experiment and seemingly similar experiments(Rakerd et al.2006;Brungart et al.2005).The discuion section would benefit from a comparison of the results from these experiments.There should be some mention of the general effect of ITI on speech-recognition, and some discuion about its cause and/or implications.(2)Age-related differences in speech-recognition: I was not entirely convinced that the differences could not be adequately explained by a combination of elderly listeners' increased susceptibility to energetic masking, elderly listeners' reduced ability to listen in the dips, and floor/ceiling effects.These simple explanations should receive more emphasis.Once they have been ruled out, more emphasis should be given to the apparent connection between the subjective results and the speech-recognition results(around 32 ms ITI).There should be more discuion about the meaning and importance of this interesting connection, and its implications for elderly listeners, perhaps mentioning auditory scene analysis.It's unfortunate that the elderly listeners were only tested for SNRs at which they had such poor speech recognition.(3)Age-related differences in subjective perception: Elderly listeners had reduced echo-thresholds for speech compared to young listeners.This seems to be a novel result.If this section is to be included, further discuion of relevant literature should be included, and further description of the method used to get these subjective responses.Perhaps this aspect could be published separately as a letter.Age-related differences were described as 'temporal decline'.If this term is to be used, it should perhaps be defined more carefully.Also, does it refer to the age-related differences in dip-listening, age-related differences in subjective perception, the interaction of subjective perception and speech-recognition, or some combination of these? If it is some combination, there should be further argument that the phenomena are related, perhaps incorporating other temporal-decline results from the literature.Overall, there is too much statistics and not enough interpretation of what the results mean.A major re-write is required, focusing on the important results in the Results section, and interpreting them in the Discuion section.-----------------MINOR COMMENTS

Pages 3-4

The second paragraph has somewhat flawed logic(the last sentence does not logically follow from the preceding sentences)and the conclusion isn't particularly relevant to the rest of the paper.It could be omitted.Page 11, lines 14-15: You describe the elderly listeners' audiograms as 'clinically normal'(also in the abstract)yet above, you suggest that some of them have 45 dB HL hearing loes for some pure tones.You might want to specify the definition of normal-hearing that you are using.I would agree with you(especially given their mean audiogram in Figure 1)that they are in the early stages of presbycusis, rather than normal-hearing.Describing them as simply 'normal-hearing' is perhaps misleading.Some indication of the range of the audiograms would be useful.Page 12, line 11.It might be helpful to include an example sentence and its translation, to save the reader referring back to the cited papers.Page 13, lines 7-14.-log(1/f)is the same as log(f);and the sum of log(f)is equal to log(the product of f).Thus you have balanced the product of the word frequencies.This seems an unusual measure: one nonsense word of frequency = 0 would not make the whole list unintelligible.Perhaps there are more meaningful comparisons of the distribution of word frequencies within a list, or perhaps that would be too much detail.It would suffice to say that the words were distributed pseudorandomly.Page 13, lines 20-21.Why was the 0.5-ms ITI not used for elderly listeners?

Page 14.A short summary of the conditions would be useful, for ease of reference.Page 15, lines 1-5: When the sentences were mixed, were their onsets simultaneous or randomised? Also, if there was no proceing other than addition(e.g.phase-randomisation)would it not be better to refer to the masker as speech babble throughout, rather than noise?

Page 16, line 13: Perhaps it would be worth mentioning that participants were(say)given two options(broad or compact);or, if the participants were free to describe the stimulus in any terms, some description of the experimenter's proce of interpretation should be mentioned.Pages 17-27: There are a large number of interactions mentioned.Not all of them have any influence on the discuion or conclusions.In fact, in many instances, there are no post hoc analyses to find the source of the interaction, nor descriptions of the effects.Not all interactions are interesting.Some may disappear under appropriate transformations;we wouldn't always expect linear effects with percent-correct recognition.However, some of the interactions you describe seem interesting.Comparing the middle-left, middle-right and bottom-left panels of Figure 2, or the two panels of Figure 4, leave me in no doubt that you have genuinely observed more release from speech maskers than noise maskers.More emphasis should be placed on describing these interesting interactions, and le emphasis should be placed on the raw statistics.Also the results section should be generally shortened, omitting statistics when the results are obvious from the figures.Example candidates for omiion are:

-p17 last lineit didn't decrease at all for the older participants;also 'faster' is perhaps not the appropriate word in this context.Page 28, paragraph 1: The raised thresholds observed for elderly listeners is not a novel result, and perhaps the previous research showing this should be referenced.Page 28, line 22: 'Wingfield' rather than 'Wingfiled'.Page 29, line 19: 'fuses with' not 'fuse withs' Page 30, line 2: 'and' rather than 'and and' Page 30, line 6: 'maskers' not 'makers'

Page 30, line 5: '...fused;they...' or '...fused, but they...' rather than '...fused, they...'.The following point from 'co-variations' could perhaps be made more clearly.Page 30, line 16: 'sufficiently' rather than 'sufficient' Page 30, line 16: 'ITI-induced' rather than 'ITI-induce'.Page 32, line 16: '...manipulations, as long as they help...' Page 33, line 1: 'loudspeakers' rather than 'loudspeaker'.Page 33, line 3: 'one or more' rather than 'one or some'

Page 33, lines 9-10: 'several papers have failed to find any age-related effects...' rather than 'there are no age-related effects on the precedence effect'.Page 33, line 13: 'ITI-induced' rather than 'ITI0induced'.Page 34, line 1: 'became 8 ms or short' should be 'was 8 ms or shorter'.Page 34, line 5: 'masker' not 'maker'

Page 34, line 15: which condition is the 'non-reverberant condition'? Keep the terminology consistent to the rest of the document.(The same applies to the rest of the summary)

Page 37: Appendix 1 should be omitted, unle the spectral differences are described and interpreted.Page 37, line 8: 'sound-progreed software'? Page 37, line 10: 'spectral' rather than 'spectrum' Page 38: Appendix 2 could be omitted

Reviewer #3 Evaluations:

Reviewer #3(Good Scientific Quality):

The paper is vague and needs reworking to make clear the goals and hypotheses driving the work and the interpretation of the results.Reviewer #3(Appropriate Journal):

Yes.Reviewer #3(Satisfactory English/References):

The English is alright, but there are many typos and grammatical errors.Reviewer #3(Tables/Figures Adequate):

Yes.Reviewer #3(Concise):

No.The introduction is long and unfocused.Reviewer #3(Appropriate Title and Abstract):

The results do not tease apart informational vs.energetic masking contributions.In meaning of “inter-target interval” is not descriptive enough to be meaningful until after reading the methods.Reviewer #3(Remarks):

This paper presents results of an experiment conducted in young and older listeners listening to target speech embedded in competing signals.The experiment uses a complex set-up, including two competing maskers from different(symmetrically positioned)locations and a target that is played from both speakers while varying the timing of the target signals from the two speakers.The authors spend a *lot* of time trying to relate this set up to the precedence effect and difficulties of understanding speech in a room, fusion of a leading and a lagging sound, and temporal proceing.The introduction is, indeed, long and hard to follow.It is not clear where the argument is going, or how the reviewed material influenced the design of the current experiments, let alone what the current experiment is trying to test.While all of the iues raised in the introduction undoubtedly contribute to the results obtained in the experiment, none of these ideas is explored fully enough to understand how or why they may be important in the current setup.What is the goal of the experiment? Why use this complex setup? What are the hypotheses for what will happen as a function of inter-target delay? For aging listeners? None of this is clear in the current presentation.Off the top of my head, here is a list of examples of the kinds of things that are very troubling in the manuscript:

There are never any clearly stated hypotheses for what should happen in the different settings, or why.There is no discuion or interpretation of the results that lends insight into what procees are contributing to the observed effects.The influences of energetic masking are not discued and the results confound release from energetic and informational masking.While the overall long-term spectral average of the speech is shown to change only by a limited amount with inter-target delay, there is no discuion of what happens in the modulation domain(which, arguably, is the most relevant domain for speech understanding).There is no discuion of how envelope cues are affected, or what this could do to INTELLIGIBILITY as well as SEGREGATION of the sources.The single-source control(dashed line in the main figures)is not an adequate control for energetic or informational masking in the two-masker conditions, and thus is eentially usele.The older listeners perform worse overall than any of the younger listeners, and thus, there is no point in the direct comparisons that are made between younger and older listeners.Nothing can really be concluded about why the older listeners do poorly, since they are worse than any of the control groups.The fact that the change in performance with inter-target delay is smaller for the older listners is meaningle, since this may be a floor effect.Similarly, the fact that changes in performance with inter-target delay are smaller in the younger listener group with the best signal-to-noise ratio than for the other groups is likely due to ceiling effects--there is no reason to expect equal changes at all performance levels(psychometric functions are sigmoidal, in general, not linear).This same problem makes the target-only control experiment particularly pointle.Given that all of the results are taken at different points on the psychometric functions and that the psychometric functions are nonlinear, the ANOVA analyses presented seem pointle to this reviewer--they compare apples and oranes.Moreover, the statistical analyses are presented **instead of** any description of what is happening and what it might mean.I would rather have some help understanding what you expected to see and why instead of a lot of statistical analyses that don't lend any insight into what was found.Throughout the manuscript, there is no attempt to determine what is due to energetic and what is due to informational masking.The noise control condition probably *only* gives energetic masking, but the amount of energetic masking it produces is different from that of the the other speech conditions.Thus, there is no way to conclude anything about how IM and EM contribute in the speech conditions as a function of inter-target delay, or what the inter-target delay is really doing.The experiment in which listeners were asked to judge the spatial quality of the different conditions might have been important in helping to interpret what was happening, but was never developed.What is shown is actually quite confusing.The older listeners may have a slightly different pattern of spatial perception as a function of inter-target delay, but this is never fully explored.No hypotheses are given to describe how these differences are likely to impact speech understanding in the speech intelligibility task.IF the results are reliable and repeatable enough to be meaningful(which is suspect, given the small number of subjects), what do you expect to happen for older listeners for whom the sounds are MORE DIFFUSE AT ZERO DELAY than for younger listeners? Wouldn't that suggest that they should have more difficulty in understanding the target compared to young listeners at these short delays? But they are like the younger listeners at the longest delays, hearing two targets.Is that good or bad? If hearing two separate targets(at the locations of the maskers)is expected to make the task harder, why aren't the older listeners BETTER than the younger listeners at the delays of 16 and 32? There is no discuion of these points to help interpret any of this.The paper ends with conclusions that are not linked to any of the results shown.How can one aert that the “listeners perceive two spatially separated images of the target and can selectively focus their attention to only one of the images(usually the leading one)”(p.29)from the data presented? This one sentence contains so many aumptions, it is indefensible.All that was measured is intelligibility.On p.31, the authors write “The results suggest a faster decay of temporal storage of the fine details of speech sound(sic)in older adults than in younger adults.” The only thing that is shown is that the older listeners have more difficulty in general, are near the performance floor, and show le dependence on the inter-target delay.There are too many leaps to go from this to aerting that there are differences in “temporal storage of the fine details.”

There are numerous typos(names mipelled, grammar iues)throughout;however, the manuscript needs to be completely rewritten before it is in an acceptable form for JASA, so I will not comment on that here.In summary, while the results might be of interest if presented in a more acceible way, with clearer justification for the experimental design and explicit hypotheses for what should happen in the different conditions, this could be salvaged into an acceptable paper.In its current form, it is not appropriate for JASA.