Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: PREVALENCE AND RISK FACTORS OF HELICOBACTER PYLORI INFECTION AMONG CHILDREN IN KUICHONG SUBDISTRICT OF SHENZHEN CITY, CHINA
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: Your introduction needs more detail to provide more justification for your study.
Remover “prospectivo” word in Objective.

Tables 2 and 3 can be included in a single table.

Introduction, results and discussion. There are a few sentences that need rephrasing for clarity.
Experimental design: Methods
A cross-sectional study is not the most appropriate to assess the risk factors of H. pylori infection among children. The design should be a cohort study or case-control. The methods were not described with sufficient detail.
•	Explain how you obtained the sample size.
•	How did they do the sampling?
•	Prevalence rates should be estimated using 95% CI.
Validity of the findings: Prevalence of H. pylori infection.
Line 129… while 8-year-old children had the highest incidence rate of H. pylori infection at 23.2%... The results must be in terms of prevalence, not incidence.
Prevalence rates should be estimated using 95% CI in each group (general, age and gender)
Tables 1, 2 and 3. Include the statistical test at the bottom of Table.

Risk factors for H. pylori infection. I suggest review interpretations of risk factors for H. pylori infection.
•	There si a negative association. Children whose parent(s) with tertiary education level (OR: 0.64; 95% CI: 0.46-0.89; P = 0.008) and larger living space at home (OR: 0.54; 95% CI: 0.28-1.07; P = 0.078) are protective factors for H. pylori infection.
•	The OR values are very low to be a high risk for H. pylori infection. Testing milk bottle temperature by taking a swig as opposed to dripping a few onto the wrist (OR: 1.79; 95% CI: 1.19-2.68; P = 0.005), sharing of cutlery between the feeding person and young children rather than using separate cutlery each during meals (OR: 1.84; 95% CI: 1.22-2.78; P = 0.004), and snacking (OR: 1.43; 95% CI: 1.01-2.01; P = 0.043) resulted in lower risks for H. pylori infection.
•	Only the eating fruits peeled than unpeeled (OR: 2.56; 95% CI: 1.4-4.71; P = 0.002) and eating out frequently for at least 5 times a week would increase the risk of infection by three times in children (OR: 3.13; 95% CI: 1.46-6.68; P = 0.003) resulted in higher risks for H. pylori infection.

Discussion
Your findings could be expanded with international studies.
The discussion should be adjusted to the corrections of results section (as I have noted above; see results).
Include and discuss the limitations of your study in a paragraph. For example, design study.
Explain you about the shortcomings and limitations C-urea breath test as a diagnostic tool for H. pylori infection.

Conclusión and Abstract
The conclusions section should be appropriately stated and should be limited to those supported by the results. Correct the conclusions according to the comments “Risk factors for H. pylori infection”
Include the prevalence findings. For example, there is a high prevalence of H. pylori among children in Shenzhen City, China.
Additional comments: In this study, the authors  to assess the Prevalence and risk factors of Helicobacter pylori infection among children in Kuichong Subdistrict of Shenzhen City, China. Your manuscript is interesting and may contribute to local epidemiology in China. However, this study has several limitations. The main limitation of this study is the design. A cross-sectional study is not the most appropriate to assess the risk factors of H. pylori infection among children. The design should be a cohort study or case-control. To make this paper publishable, the author needs to respond to the comments, as I have noted above.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: PREVALENCE AND RISK FACTORS OF HELICOBACTER PYLORI INFECTION AMONG CHILDREN IN KUICHONG SUBDISTRICT OF SHENZHEN CITY, CHINA
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Nothing more do add. The revision was accomplished as suggested by the reviewers.
Experimental design: Nothing more do add. The revision was accomplished as suggested by the reviewers.
Validity of the findings: Nothing more do add.
Additional comments: Nothing more do add. The revision was accomplished as suggested by the reviewers. I believe that the paper is ready for final publication process.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: PREVALENCE AND RISK FACTORS OF HELICOBACTER PYLORI INFECTION AMONG CHILDREN IN KUICHONG SUBDISTRICT OF SHENZHEN CITY, CHINA
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: No comments.
Experimental design: No comments.
Validity of the findings: Abstract and Results sections. The overall H. pilory prevalence rate (16.7%) should be estimated using 95% CI.

Conclusion. The sentence “In the Kuichong Subdistrict of Shenzhen City, China, 16.7% of children aged 6-12 years were found to be infected with H. pylori” is repetitive. Consider “there is a high prevalence of H. pylori among children aged 6-12 years in Shenzhen City, China”.
Additional comments: No comments.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: NITROGEN EUTROPHICATION PARTICULARLY PROMOTES TURF ALGAE IN CORAL REEFS OF THE CENTRAL RED SEA
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: .
Experimental design: .
Validity of the findings: .
Additional comments: Review of PeerJ 42898 - “Nitrogen eutrophication particularly promotes turf algae in coral reefs of the central Red Sea” by Karcher et al.

This paper provides exciting new data on how increasing human nitrogen enrichment affects coral reef communities in the Red Sea. The approach and methods are solid and the paper is well-written and referenced. I have made a few minor comments below, and suggestions for additional references and perspectives that could further strengthen the paper. I did not have access to the Figures or Tables, so cannot comment on those.  Overall, well worthy of publication in PeerJ.

Abstract

Line 29, what about non-point source? Septic tanks, cesspits, atmospheric deposition?

Line 34 , what are the “background” N concentrations?

Line 35, what were the enriched NH4 and NO3 concentrations?

Line 42, did the N enrichment actually lead to increased productivity (growth) of turf algae or is that assumed based on higher Corg content?

Line 110, how about experimental artifacts?

Line 134, important to add here the mean values and range for ammonium, nitrate, and phosphate, as well as DIN/phosphate ratio, if possible, for the reef study site.

Line 151, spelling, fluorometrically

Introduction

Line 60, are these sewage discharges from point-source outfalls or from non-point source, such as septic tanks/cesspits?

Line 85, Revise this sentence to read “and while the input of N can be measured by the long-term increase in forms of N concentrations (Lapointe et al. 2019), it is most directly traceable in the short-term by the isotopic signature of reef biota.”

Line 159, replace “ca.” with approximately or “~”

Line 253, might want to add here that the DIN/PO4 ratio is 3.4:1. That could indicate a relatively low degree of PO4 stress (starvation) in reef corals. What was the major form of DIN in the fertilizer? Ammonium, nitrate, or both?

Line 310, could add here: “In the eutrophic waters of the Florida Keys, the N:P ratio of turf algae (293:1) increased to a much greater extent than that of macroalgae (71:1) as DIN concentrations increased over a 3-decade period (Lapointe et al. 2019).”

Line 347/348, the low DIN/PO4 ratios in ambient waters at the reef would suggest a relatively low degree of P-limitation, which helps explain the greater uptake of N than P.
Line 364, add Caribbean Sea and cite: Vermeij MJ, Van Moorselaar I, Engelhard S, Hörnlein C, Vonk SM, Visser PM (2010) The effects of nutrient enrichment and herbivore abundance on the ability of turf algae to overgrow coral in the Caribbean. PLoS One 5(12):e14312. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0014312
Line 456, add “both point-source and non-point source…” The non-point sources include septic tanks and cesspits that are major contributers to N enrichment in many urbanized coastal waters.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: NITROGEN EUTROPHICATION PARTICULARLY PROMOTES TURF ALGAE IN CORAL REEFS OF THE CENTRAL RED SEA
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: This work reports on experiments carried out in the Red Sea on the impacts of eutrophication on the nitrogen and carbon content and stable isotope composition of hard coral, soft corals, sediments and zooxanthellae.  The authors do a very thorough job reporting on the background research and sometimes confounding results in the literature.  The structure of the written work as well as tables and figures were easy to follow without being overly simplistic.

There were a couple grammatical errors / typos that can be easily fixed:

line 97: Smith et al. 2010
line: 242: "however also showed". this was confusing
line 350: use of "remained" was confusing
Experimental design: The experimental design was robust and all the idiosyncrasies in sample numbers were explained by the author and were the result on conducting experimental work in situ. The statistical analysis of the work was also robust and used appropriate techniques based on the data.

The techniques used to measure the impact of localized eutrophication were multidimensional and thus added depth to the overall interpretation of the results.
Validity of the findings: The finding of the research are largely consistent with previous work and where it differs the authors offer likely explanations.  The discussion and conclusion are well developed and succinctly relate their work to that of the larger body of knowledge in this field.
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: DEVELOPMENT OF VOCAL EMOTION RECOGNITION IN SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN: THE EMOHI TEST FOR HEARING-IMPAIRED POPULATIONS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: This study reports on normative data for vocal emotion recognition ability, between 4 and 12 years of age, as well as in adults. The emotions are restricted to 3 basic types: happy, sad, and angry, making it possible to perform even for kids as young as 4. Furthermore, participants were either Dutch or English speakers.

The results show no difference with emotion type, and no language differences, but an undeniable developmental trend (that did not interact with emotion or language). Surprisingly perhaps, the 12 y.o. children performed 15% more poorly than the adults, suggesting that development in emotional processing as a whole is far from complete in adolescence. Overall, this study is perfectly well designed, executed, and analyzed appropriately. It provides one more tool, the EmoHI test, to investigate emotional development across a wide range of ages and different populations of interest, which is much needed in the field. I have only a few minor comments to help improve the manuscript further.
Experimental design: The study was carefully designed and executed. There are only a few points of minor confusion.

Line 90-91: Can you clarify that these are non-intelligible sentences? But are they still sounding more like Dutch than English? Is that why you looked at two languages?

Line 100: I’m confused as to why there are three items. Each of the 4 speakers received the highest ratings online, on average, but in each speaker, you selected the highest-rated productions among several tokens of the same sentences? And this happened to be always 2 times one sentence and 1 time the other?

Line 119: seems like a cool game for kids, well done! Have you made this game available?
Validity of the findings: The findings make a lot of sense, and respond clearly to the goal of providing normative data in this task.

Line 152: “did not show adult-like performance yet”; indeed, and that’s quite impressive. Can you clarify the difference in percentage points here?

Line 166: Interesting. Could you say a few more lines on why this happens? Is it the type of F0 inflections that the native speakers use that sound very natural or more foreign?
Additional comments: Not much rationale is presented in the introduction as to why two different languages were examined. It may be useful to rearrange some elements from the discussion paragraph (162-173) back into the introduction.

A subtle point of discord: The authors state that CI children do not have any problems with identifying visual emotions (lines 51-53), implying that the deficits are exclusively driven by the auditory modality. This point is debatable as a function of age. In Hopyan-Misakyan’s study, the children were above seven years of age. At younger ages, this may not be quite true. For example, Wiefferink et al. (2012) looked at kids from 2.5 to 5, i.e. pre-school, and found more general impairment in emotion processing (in CI kids), including facial emotion identification. Fully understanding what an emotion entails, what it looks like from an outsider’s perspective, and what it feels like from an insider’s perspective, is a fairly complex thing to do. The more modalities are available, the easier it is to integrate the different aspects that characterize an emotion. For example, sadness is not just about eyes dropping and a lack of smile; it is equally important to appreciate that it generally sounds like a slow melodic pattern with fairly monotonous intonation and homogeneous intensity contour, and more broadly, it may be accompanied by a heavy sensation in the heart, and a bitter taste in the mouth. Therefore, emotion conceptualization is certainly multi-modal.  Since CI children have poor reception of vocal characteristics, they may well construct their emotional concepts with little care for the auditory modality. As a consequence, the mental representations of emotions may not be as distinct as for normal-hearing children, and this could explain why CI children have deficits even in a facial emotion task.  This is quite counter-intuitive considering that CI children might have more prominent visual emotion cues, one could almost hypothesize the contrary, namely that they should surpass NH kids at some point in their development, in a visual emotion task. But this does not seem to happen and this is what makes this field so interesting. The construction of emotional concepts is key.
There is an interesting parallel with respect to the concept of pitch, which I think is worth mentioning since your study is also about cross-language effects. In English, pitch is conceptualized (and taught) with descriptive such as “high” and “low”, which are easily confusable with spatial connotations, but also loudness connotations and emotional states. In other languages, French and Spanish, there are specific words for pitch, for example “aigu/grave”, and just this difference seems enough to induce a better ability to label changes in pitch early on (Costa-Giomi and Descombes, 1996). The way I understand this sort of phenomena is that concepts are easier to recognize when their mental representations are specific, more separated  from each other in cognitive space. This is true of something as simple as pitch, as well as more complex notions like emotions.

In other words, what may be happening is that somehow, with advancements in cognitive skills, the CI children must catch up on their NH peers in emotional processing, sometime between 4-5 and 7-8 years of age, and I think this would deserve a close look. I'm glad the authors are already planning on such investigations, and I hope they will consider looking at pre-school children as well.

References:
Costa-Giomi, E., and Descombes, V. (1996). “Pitch labels with single and multiple meanings: A study with French-speaking children”, J. Res.Music Ed. 44, 204-214.
Wiefferink, C.H., Rieffe, C., Ketelaar, L., de Raeve, L., and Frijns, J.H.M. (2012). “Emotion understanding in deaf children with a cochlear implant”, J. Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, doi: 10.1093/deafed/ens042.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: DEVELOPMENT OF VOCAL EMOTION RECOGNITION IN SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN: THE EMOHI TEST FOR HEARING-IMPAIRED POPULATIONS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: In general, the literature is well-referenced in the paper. However, there are two places where it could be enhanced:

1. Line 38: Since this sentence is demonstrating the knowledge gap you wish to fill with this paper, it seems important that your reference is more recent than the 1986 Scherer review. Especially since you then go on to cite more recent studies.

2. Line 36: Would it be possible to get a more recent reference or two? 1994 is pretty old now. It would also strengthen your claim to have a few more example references demonstrating the breadth of studies that used visual or audiovisual stimuli.

The raw data is supplied and is very clear and seems totally anonymized.

The article conforms very well to PeerJ standards and is quite clear. The only possible issue is in the Reference section:

3. In the References section, it seems that the titles of the cited literature should all be lower case after the first letter. Check that you have done this. For instance, Line 202-203. Perhaps the rule is different for a book chapter title, this is unclear. Line 213-215 really should be lower case. Double check all references for this issue.

The figures in the paper are really wonderful, very clear and demonstrative. I only have one small suggestion for Table 1:

4. Table 1: Small note on formatting–consider centering the values and the column labels to make it a bit neater.

Overall, clear and professional English language is used throughout the paper. There are a few places where perhaps the sentence structure or word choice could be improved. I have outlined these instances below. Because there are a lot of small comments and none are particularly more important than the next, these are in line number order:

5. Lines 19-20: There may be a typo in this sentence (at least it showed up in other versions of the abstract). Written is “becrucial” instead of “be crucial”. Be sure the space needed between the words is actually there.

6. Line 21: The phrase, “…productions of multiple speakers…,” maybe should be, “…productions from multiple speakers…,” instead.

7. Line 29: I’m not sure if “furthermore” is really the right word here–maybe use the word “additionally” instead.

8. Lines 30-31: It is unclear if “emphasizes” is the right word in that sentence–maybe use the word “demonstrates” instead.

9. Line 32: The phrase, “age-related performances that are captured,” is a little awkward and unclear in meaning. It might be helpful to find another way to phrase the first half of that sentence.

10. Line 44: There does not need to be a comma between the words “than, when”.

11. Line 46: This phrase is a bit awkward, “… better in facial than vocal emotion recognition tasks”–maybe write, “better in facial emotion recognition tasks than in vocal emotion ones” instead.

12. Line 58: I’m a little confused by the statement, “may also lead to less robust representations of vocal emotion”–do you mean when they speak, they then use less robust representations of vocal emotion? Or that there are less robust representations of vocal emotion in their mind? It could be helpful to clarify the meaning of the phrase a bit.

13. Line 62-64: This sentence is a bit long and not clear in a few places. It could be broken into multiple shorter sentences for clarity (more specific suggestions are below in point 14 and 15).

14. Line 62: Regarding the beginning of the sentence, “This difference may…”–given the sentence before, don’t you mean “difficulty” instead of “difference”?

15. Line 63: The phrase, “… higher reliance on differences in speaking rate,” is awkward. Do you mean higher-than-average? Or a more weighted reliance? It would be good to clarify this by rephrasing.

16. Line 67: It would be good to add “audiovisual” to the sentence since you mention videos, i.e. “has used visual or audiovisual materials…”.

17. Line 68-70: I recommend breaking that sentence into two sentences, it’s a run-on as-is.

18. Line 78-79: Use either text or numbers to describe how many participants there were because mixing makes the sentence confusing at first glance.

19. Line 82: The phrase, “approved by local ethics committees…,” is missing a “the”:  should be “approved by the local ethics committees”.

20. Line 105-107: This sentence is a bit awkward. Perhaps rephrase, “Since the present experiment… data were collected from the same population of children and adults for multiple experiments…”

21. Line 158: For the phrase, “as was shown for the development…”, recommend replacing “for” with “in research on”: so phrase as, “as was shown in research on the development…”

22. Line 160-161: That comma is not needed–maybe use the word “since” instead of “as”.

23. Line 170: Clarify that this sentence refers specifically to your results: i.e. “… the lack of a native language benefit in our results may also be due…”

24. Line 176: You might want to rephrase the sentence as follows, “… for typically-developing, school-age children with normal hearing…” just to break up all those descriptors and make it easier to read.

25. Line 176-179: Break that sentence into two sentences, because they are not totally related ideas and it is a bit awkwardly phrased.

26. Line 180-184: These two sentences feel redundant of each other and also don’t really provide a clear point. Is your point that you are now expanding this work into the CI population? It would be good to make that clearer.

27. Line 188: You are missing the word “the”: It should be, “We are grateful to all of the children, parents…”

28. Line 188-189: I recommend replacing the word “of” with “recorded for”: so, “…the speakers recorded for our stimuli, and…”
Experimental design: The work is original and fits well within the scope of this journal. The research questions are generally well defined and are highly relevant. There is just one place in the paper where two sentences setting up the research question might be rephrased for further clarity:

29. Lines 17-20: The first and second sentence of the abstract do not quite connect. I understand you are setting up the issues you wanted to address with your paper, but connecting the thoughts better would make that clearer. Maybe add on to the end of the first sentence “or of good audio quality” to connect them.

The investigation in this study is well and ethically performed. I only had one question about the methodology:

30. Line 168: Why did you decide to use only three basic emotions for this test? The decision is not explained in the paper. It could strengthen the work to address this choice in the introduction with a sentence or two.

The methods are largely described in enough detail to be replicated. There is just one place where things are a little bit unclear:

31. Lines 100-102: These sentences are a little difficult to parse, particularly the phrase “combinations of two times one sentence and one time the other sentence”. Maybe write, “stimuli with three productions (one sentence repeated once + another sentence) per emotion and per speaker (3 productions x 3 emotions x 4 speakers) as well as 4 practice stimuli with one production per speaker…”. The use of the word “items” is confusing because it wasn’t used before–maybe continue using the word “productions” instead. Also for the sake of replication, it would be helpful to know which sentence was repeated and which was not.
Validity of the findings: All the data for the project are provided and very clear. The results are clearly laid out with an excellent figure. The conclusions are fairly well-stated. There are only two instances where things could be clearer:

32. Lines 26-29: This sentence is a bit confusing mainly because it is too long and changes focus too often. I recommend that you split it into two sentences: one about how the children improved, and one sentence about how they still did not reach adult-like values.

33. Line 184-186: It’s not immediately clear why the EmoHI Test is suitable for hearing-impaired or clinical populations specifically, as your sentence currently implies. Perhaps break it into two sentences. The first about how the results indicate the usefulness of EmoHI across ages and languages. Then a second sentence about how this normative data and the high quality of the recordings make EmoHI also useful for hearing impaired and other clinical populations.
Additional comments: Overall this is a really well-done, well-written article that, with minor changes, seems ready to be published. Congratulations to the authors on producing such a concise, informative, and valuable paper.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: DEVELOPMENT OF VOCAL EMOTION RECOGNITION IN SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN: THE EMOHI TEST FOR HEARING-IMPAIRED POPULATIONS
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Yes, it is very well written. The authors have added several references, including more recent papers. The literature is well covered. The table is a nice addition. Raw data are shared. All good.
Experimental design: As I mentioned in my earlier comments, the study was well conceived and executed. The research question is well defined and the results clear and concisely reported. Rigorous approach and ethical standards.
Validity of the findings: The findings are interesting and the EmoHI would be a very useful tool for future investigations. I think the developmental trend is particularly worth examining further.
Additional comments: The authors have done a good job at revising their manuscript.
I have no more comment. Congratulations on a great contribution to the field!


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: DEVELOPMENT OF VOCAL EMOTION RECOGNITION IN SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN: THE EMOHI TEST FOR HEARING-IMPAIRED POPULATIONS
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Overall, the manuscript is quite clear and cites an appropriate amount of related work throughout it. However, especially in some of the newer sections, there are still some unclear/awkward sentence structures. I have included some corrections and suggestions below:

-	Line 22: I would add “are not” to make the sentence even clearer, i.e. “… test materials are not always readily available or are not of good quality…”
-	Line 37-38: It is not clear how exactly implantation age was “taken into account”. Maybe instead: “…when measuring from their age at CI implantation (hearing age)”.
-	Line 38-40: This sentence doesn’t quite work. Something clearer might be: “However, CI children showed great variability in their performance, ranging from ceiling (97.2%) to below chance-level performance (27.8%), which could not be explained by chronological age alone.”
-	Line 50-53: The sentence is not properly constructed in English, the second half of it at least. Something like this would be more correct: “… it seems to take until late childhood for this ability to develop to adult-like levels”
-	Line 83-84: This sentence is unclear. Effects of what conceptual knowledge, emotional concepts? How is that related to pitch discrimination?
-	Line 85-87: Put the word “also” later in the sentence, i.e.: “Finally, perceptual limitations, such as increased F0 discrimination thresholds (source), may also play a role…”
-	Line 102: Is “linguistic distance” the same as geographical distance? Maybe include a very brief definition in parentheses.
-	Line 112-113: The last part of this sentence feels random here, like it should have been mentioned earlier. Because in this paragraph, the main point is why good quality audio stimuli are important for testing hearing-impaired participants, not that their ability to hear emotion from voices is important for their quality of life. This part specifically seems unrelated at this point in the article: “… which have been shown to relate to their self-reported quality of life”
-	Line 238-9: The way the sentence is worded is a bit awkward and unclear. Perhaps something like: “Considering CI children’s hearing age instead of chronological age, 9 out of 14 CI children (64.3%) still show performance within…”
-	Line 287: The sentence is a bit clunky, it would help to add “and indicates that” in the middle, i.e.: “…level, which shows that almost all CI children could reliably perform the task, and indicates that the task seems…”
-	Line 290: Instead of “even”, use “still” later in the sentence. i.e.: “… instead of their chronological age, 9 out of 14 CI children still fell within…”
-	Line 304-307: This sentence is a bit confusing at the end. What is meant by “an acute effect” and “a long-term effect”? Basically the listing here is confusing. By the end of the sentence, it isn’t clear what you are saying CI children’s performances are related to.
-	Line 319: The use of the word “evidence” as a verb is a bit off-putting/confusing at first glance. Perhaps use “demonstrate” or something else.
-	Figure 2 & 3: Perhaps explain the dotted line thresholds in the caption, it isn’t totally clear what that represents.
Experimental design: No corrections here, everything is much clearer post-revisions. Well done!
Validity of the findings: No comments here as well, looks good!
Additional comments: The revisions were nicely done as a whole. There really are only some writing adjustments that could be made for clarity. Otherwise, the article seems to be in really good shape. It was interesting to read the CI children results, I support your decision to include them. Well done as a whole!


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: AN INVESTIGATION OF PERCEPTUAL BIASES IN COMPLEX REGIONAL PAIN SYNDROME
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The article is written very clearly, is appropriately supported by literature, and includes sufficient introduction and background. The Figures and Tables are of a high quality and mostly conforms to the structure suggested in the 'instructions to authors'. The paper represents a coherent body of work.

The article fails to meet the following PeerJ standards:
 - The PeerJ format requests a separate 'conclusions' section, however I think this is probably only a minor departure from the suggested structure.
 - It is a requirement of PeerJ that authors provide the raw data (or a link to where it can be downloaded). I did not see where to access this - can the authors please provide it. Apologies if I missed the link.
Experimental design: The article fits within the aims and scope of PeerJ, has a well defined research question that clearly fills an identified knowledge gap, rigorously tests this question using appropriate methodology, and describes the methodology in sufficient detail.

Given that the authors aim to ‘replicate and extend’ the study of Moseley and colleagues, it is noticeable that they use a different method to determine the intensity of the tactile stimuli. The stimuli in Moseley’s study were set at 140% of the sensory detection threshold for each hand, which could potentially be of lower intensity/salience to what was used in the current study (e.g. it could be that 140% of sensory detection threshold is more equivalent to 2 on the five point scale that the current authors used). More subtle tactile stimuli could have created greater sensory uncertainty, which could be a necessary condition for spatial perception biases to manifest. It could be that when stimuli are more salient, the temporal order is more accurately perceived. The authors should consider this possibility in their discussion.
Validity of the findings: The data are mostly robust and support the conclusions drawn. However, I question whether the sample sizes of each group are sufficient for the linear mixed models analyses that the authors perform to examine whether PSS is predicted by clinical factors such as temperature difference. Any conclusions drawn from these analyses are at best speculative.

It is noticeable that no pain-free controls were tested, although this would have been an easy group to recruit. Without a group of pain-free controls, there is no way that the authors can conclude that the somatospatial remapping of people with CRPS and other pain conditions is ‘normal’. Although the different pain groups showed larger JNDs in the crossed hands condition compared to the uncrossed hand condition, all this suggests is that at least some somatospatial remapping is happening. However, it doesn’t tell us if the cost of crossing hands is comparable to what would be seen in pain-free controls performing the same task. If the authors wish to make this conclusion, then they need to add data from some pain-free controls.
Additional comments: This is overall a good manuscript and a well designed study. I suggest the following changes to improve the clarity and accuracy of the manuscript:
-	In both the abstract and the introduction, the authors declare that the aim of the study was to replicate the study of Moseley et al, and to extend it by comparing perceptual biases in a CRPS group with two non-CRPS pain control groups. It would be helpful if they added to these sections an explicit statement about why / to what end they were aiming to do this.
-	In the abstract the authors state that they expected biased TOJs in the three patient groups, but it is not clear from the abstract why they would expect it in the wrist and shoulder pain patients.
-	The abstract seems to be missing a conclusion
-	Line 27 – The term “vegetative symptoms” is not an accepted term to describe CRPS and in English can mean other things. Please change to “vasomotor” or “sudomotor” or “inflammatory” or some other descriptor per the Budapest criteria

-	Line 28 – Although CRPS often follows a minor or mild trauma, the CRPS is not necessarily the result of these traumas.
-	Line 39-40. The wording of this sentence is somewhat complicated – suggest ‘…akin to hemispatial neglect is contested’.
-	Line 58 – Bultitude and colleagues did not replicate the study of Filbrich et al – the Bultitude study came out first. Suggest instead writing ‘…were also shown in…’. It also seems relevant to mention that the bias in the study of Bultitude et al was predicted by body representation distortion.
-	Line 72 ‘an important number of’ – this is somewhat vague
-	Line 75. It could be made clearer what the implications of this paragraph is.
-	Lines 76-78. The authors state their aim here, but it is not clear why or to what end they wish to address this aim? The authors could make it clearer what additional insight their study would add over what has already been done.
-	About lines 86 to 91. The hypotheses could be expressed more clearly. For example, it is a bit hard to follow the sentences at the end ‘according to the latter hypothesis / former hypothesis…’ It is not clear what the hypotheses would be for the CRPS groups here, and why you expect changes in the non-CRPS groups at all.
-	Line 98 – did patients in the first group have CRPS affecting only one upper limb?
-	Line 98 – suggest deleting the word ‘pain’ following ‘(3)’
-	Line 102 – not clear what you mean by ‘had insufficiently corrected visual impairments’. How was this defined?
-	Section 2.1 – why were people with CRPS Type II excluded from the study? How did the authors decide on the sample size?
-	Line 129 – ‘wrest’  ‘rest’
-	Line 171-172 – ‘when deemed necessary by the experimenter’. Under what conditions would the experimenter deem it necessary?
-	Line 251 – temperature difference is mentioned here but doesn’t appear to occur earlier in the manuscript. The authors should explain how this is measured and when earlier in the methods section.
-	Line 266 and elsewhere – the authors should provide a citation for the Budapest criteria (or refer to the appendix)
-	Line 281 – it states here that CRPS was diagnosed by the medical doctor, but elsewhere the authors state that the patients were assessed for CRPS at the beginning of the research session. Please clarify.
-	Line 287 – did these three patients meet the clinical diagnostic criteria for CRPS
-	Section 3.1.1., 3.1.2, 3.1.3 – please add average chronicity for each of these groups, since it seems to become relevant in the discussion.
-	Line 321 – reporting the task as ‘meaningful’ and ‘not having to guess’ don’t seem to equate to each other in the TOJ task. By definition, participants should feel like they need to guess for at least some of the trials (e.g. the ±10ms ones).
-	Lines 360-364 and 368-374. The extent to which these significant results of the LMM analyses can be considered meaningful is questionable considering the small sample size for each group.
-	Lines 421, 427, and 434. The authors classify a p=.07 as ‘marginally significant’ in one place and not significant in another. They also classify p=.09 as not significant. They should be consistent, and should adhere to the convention of classing p>.05 as simply ‘non-significant’ unless they have a good a priori justification for doing otherwise.
-	Line 436 – the authors state that the goal was to replicate the study of Moseley et al, however I would argue that they are understating the importance of their study. They did not just merely replicate the study of Moseley et al, but looked to extend and add to it
-	Line 448 – ‘did not succeed to evidence any data in favor of’. This is unnecessarily wordy – suggest simply ‘did not support’
-


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: AN INVESTIGATION OF PERCEPTUAL BIASES IN COMPLEX REGIONAL PAIN SYNDROME
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Excellent - it ticks all the boxes. For minor suggestions, see my full review.
Experimental design: Excellent with exception of failure to lodge an a priori protocol and undertake a power calculation on known variances. This means that the study may have been underpowered to detect effects, although the data as they are presented do not give a hint that this may be the case.
Validity of the findings: Excellent.
Additional comments: I thought this was a really well conducted and very interesting study. In attempting to replicate a finding we have replicated twice, this study did not. I think it is a really important study. I think there are some improvements that could be made to the reporting, although on the whole it is really well covered. I think there are limitations that should be mentioned. I think there are potential explanations for non-replication that could be discussed and should, therefore, trigger more discussion in the field. I actually think this study adds some more fodder to the growing impression in the field that CRPS neurology is very difficult to get clarity on.

There is at least one citation that is replicated in the reference list (ie listed twice)
citation 14 is incomplete
L.G. Moseley should be G.L Moseley – this seems to apply to all listings

Line 31  I think PeerJ readers might not know what you mean by representation. I would explain this very briefly. Also line 34 you use represent in possibly another way. I recommend taking care to be precise and consistent with these terms as they can mean various things to various people.

In this same paragraph, worth adding that studies of motor processing seem consistent with a spatially defined deficit, rather than just ‘perceving its position’ – see early work (already cited): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11571225 and more recent exploration: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28779873

line 71 should cite other evidence of cortical dysfunction contributing to CRPS signs and symptoms shows smaller but still present effects in non-CRPS pain: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18438892 furthermore, at least one study in people with back pain replicated this spatial effect, so it is not unique to CRPS: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22744662

line 98 is calling shoulder patients ‘pain patients’ intentional? If so, what is the difference between them and the wrist pain patients?

Line 122 The protocol is helpful, although it is really a more complete methods section with some results. I think the reference to it as a protocol should be changed to ‘full methods and recruitment flow charts are presented here [link].  Referring to it as a protocol implies an a priori document that is locked prior to data collection. I also think the methods section of the manuscript should include a list of all assessments undertaken, whether the order was randomised and whether any were completed prior to presentation for data collection. The results section should state how long the pre-assessments took participants to complete and what the full completion rate was on questionnaires (we have found that sensitivity of our experiments reduces with longer pre-experiment burden. This burden seems very large).

It looks like you did not do an a priori sample size calculation, which is surprising because it is seeking to replicate a previous study, so effect sizes are known.

Line 157 I am not sure what equiprobability means here. I presume you mean the stimuli were counterbalanced, not truly randomised, so that all SOAs were delivered the same number of times. Please clarify in manuscript

Line 186 typo

Line 186 was experimenter blind to stimulus? Blind to hypothesis? Blind to group? Blind to condition?

Perhaps always refer to posture as posture, not sometimes condition

Line 282 please state the results from the protocol flow chard wrt to proportion of original potential participants who were finally included.

Line 472 suggests temperature difference – PSS effect only wrist and shoulder, but results suggest also for CRPS. Please clarify.

Line 487 I think in this study, the participants are not patients.

Line 506 While I agree the sample is similar, a study to replicate a finding has good opportunity to determine required sample a priori based on effect size (although I see the variance in this study is much larger than that in previous studies). I think you should note that not performing a sample calculation is a limitation. Further, in line with current standards, that there was no a priori locked protocol for this study is an oversight. See recommendations for the pain field here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29697535 citing this paper would aid getting this standard more readily adopted in pain field.

I think the discussion of why these results contrast with previous results is underdone. I think this study is very well conducted, so the different results are important to think seriously about. Here are some issues that I think you should raise:
temperature difference between limbs. In the previous studies, participants were cold type CRPS, whereas this study seems to have a mix.
Duration – you mention this, but previous studies involved more chronic patients – how might that explain the difference?
Location of tactors – previous studies used cubes with vibrotactors inside them so the stimuli were delivered to pads of fingers. Might this contribute?
The variance is in this study is much bigger than previous, which has two interesting implications: that the sample was more heterogenous and that the methods introduced more variability.  One potential contributor was the use of verbal report not foot switch, the presumably unblinded experimenter (although one might expect this to increase risk of false positive not false negative results), experimenter sitting in front of participant rather than behind, CRPS patients having some other diagnoses too.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: AN INVESTIGATION OF PERCEPTUAL BIASES IN COMPLEX REGIONAL PAIN SYNDROME
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: No further comment
Experimental design: No further comment
Validity of the findings: The authors have satisfied my previous comment about the lack of sufficient sample size to make any firm conclusions about individual differences. However, there is still some work to be done with regard to my second comment about the fact that the lack of a control group limits their ability to conclude that people with CRPS have 'normal' somatospatial remapping.

It is clear that the somatospatial remapping effect is well-replicated in healthy controls in many studies, and it is also clear that the people with CRPS in this study showed a somatospatial remapping effect (larger JNDs in the crossed hand condition than uncrossed hand condition). However it is not clear if the somatospatial remapping effect that the authors found was of a similar nature and magnitude to that which would have been shown by matched control participants. Indeed, it seems that the performance of the participants with CRPS might have been more impaired by crossing hands that controls might have been - e.g. the authors state that the data of ten patients were disregarded in the crossed hands posture - is that similar to the number that would have had to been disregarded when controls are tested? Therefore, even though the CRPS patients showed a somatospatial remapping effect, you cannot conclude from these data that this was "just like healthy volunteers", nor that "somatosensory remapping abilities are not affected in CRPS". That is, it looks like CRPS patients might show greater remapping deficits than controls, but it is not possible to know because there are no control data in this study. Do the authors have data from a comparable study that they could refer to?
Additional comments: Only one additional minor comment - line 559 - suggest more “chronic CRPS patients”, since the wrist and shoulder pain patients in this study had comparable chronicity to at least one previous study


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: AN INVESTIGATION OF PERCEPTUAL BIASES IN COMPLEX REGIONAL PAIN SYNDROME
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Excellent
Experimental design: Good
Validity of the findings: High
Additional comments: I think this version is much stronger and a really important contribution to the field. I have no suggestions for improvement, but just note a few minor typo's - spelling mistakes in the reference list for example.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: CAPTURING VARIATION IN FLORAL SHAPE: A VIRTUAL3D BASED MORPHOSPACE FOR PELARGONIUM
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: English language: This manuscript is mix of grammatically correct, easy to read sentences and sentences that are more difficult to understand.

For example:

Line 56: “The total variation in shape of a clade….”  Do clades have shapes?

Line 59:  (GMM) in parentheses should follow the first use of the phrase in line 58, and then be used without parentheses in line 59.

Line 65; “…used here as a proxy to determine inclusiveness or accuracy” is unclear.  In fact, the entire paragraph could be rewritten to increase readability.

Line 79: This sentence might be clearer if it read: However, studies have shown that different organs within individual flowers are not synchronized in their development…”

Into and Background show context:

1. Lines 103-107:  I thought (and the floral morphologist Peter Endress, who reviewed our paper, agreed) that we (Tsai, et al. 2018) clearly showed that the “nectar spur” is in fact, NOT A SPUR adnate to the pedicle, but instead is a unique type of nectar tube that forms via elongation of the receptacle.  Citing our paper amongst these others that assume (without doing and development) that the spur is adnate to corolla is misrepresenting our work.  If the authors disagree with our interpretation, then it seems to me that good science dictates that they justify calling the organ a SPUR.  This may seem like a trivial point to a non-morphologist, but it is important to morphologists (and it matters with respect to gene ontologies).  A relatively easy work around is simply to replace “spur” everywhere it occurs, including the figures and legends, with “tube” or “Nectar Tube.”

To that end, the pedicle is not “occupied”  or “filled” by the nectar tube.  Instead, the comparison is between pedicle + receptacle length relative to receptacle length.

2. An issue that should be considered in the introduction is why describing a morphospace is important. There does not seem to be a central research question, e.g. line 91.

Line 116-117:  Why/how is the short nectar tube of P. cotyledonis evidence that the pollination syndrome is highly specialized? Generally more actinomorphic corollas with short nectar spurs indicates greater generalization.

Literature well referenced and relevant:

Line 79: (refs)????
See above re. Tsai et al.  2018.
Line 101, van de Kerke et al. 2019 show a “pattern of deep splits as well as more recent species radiations.”  I don’t think the additional reference to Bakker, et al. 2005 is necessary.

Figures relevant, high quality:

Fig. 2. Show images with larger points for sliding landmarks.  The small points are not visible if the figure is printed on a standard B&W printer.

Raw data supplied: NO
Experimental design: For the most part, the experimental design is clearly described, with some exceptions.

Line 147: “We selected flowers with corollas and flowers with stamens, used as proxy for full anthesis of the spurs.”
Does this mean that the authors removed the petals in order to photograph flowers from the side? Or that they waited until the petals fell off.  If this is the case, then the anthers would have been past functioning since most species are protandrous.
What do anthers have to do with “full anthesis of the spurs”?  Are you using anthesis to mean fully elongated or fully mature?

Line 153: A description of how primary landmarks were chosen should be added as an appendix, and it would be good to provide more description of what a sliding landmark is, and how they were determined.

Line 161: Clarification is needed regarding “midrib, primary and secondary veins…as a guide.”  How was the midrib vein identified?  I don’t see it in this image.

**Most important point**  I am confused as to why the authors did not photograph a flower from the top, and then remove the petals, and photograph the SAME FLOWER from the side at the same time?  I don’t understand what is meant by Line 173: “(as a result of the separate sampling in order to avoid of asynchronization).”  Given incredibly high variation in floral size and color within and among individuals of a species, mixing and matching flowers of varying petal dimensions with random nectar tube dimensions from another flower, the authors are creating virtual flowers that may not exist.  Within a species, shorter nectar tubes could be associated with smaller petals, while longer tubes are associated with larger petals.  If this is the case, the size-free shapes would be very similar, and the degree of variation among virtual 3D flowers within a species would be much lower.  If tube lengths are independent of petal sizes, then the mix and match approach here is representative of true variation.
Validity of the findings: 1. The descriptions of morphometric variation among nectar tubes and among petals are interesting and relevant to understanding overall floral variation in this genus.

2. Unfortunately, while the method of creating the 3D virtual flowers is very cool, I don’t understand the value of the exercise if the 3D virtual flowers don’t reflect real allometric constraints observed among individual flowers. How can conclusions regarding the biology of the relationship between tube length and petal size in this group be drawn from these studies.

3. By adding size back into the analysis after the procrustean alignment, I assume the authors are describing multivariate variation in size and shape with the PCA analysis, not just shape. This point should be addressed more explicitly.
Additional comments: I appreciate that this study involved a lot of work, and I wish I wasn’t so skeptical of the linking of two different data sets.  Even though reviewers are not supposed to offer opinions, I can see a couple of ways forward.  One would be to measure another limited set of flowers  (say 10 per species on different plants) to demonstrate how consistently petal size and nectar tube size scale among flowers on maybe 10 species (not the full morphometric data set, just a measure of petal size and nectar tube length); use one "homologous" time point.  If there are tight allometric constraints, use these to define your parameters for mixing and matching.  An additional approach is to not apply the 3D approach to these data and instead analyze each data set separately, both with size included, and size-free, i.e. how much floral variation among and within species is due to differences in floral size versus shape at anthesis?


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: CAPTURING VARIATION IN FLORAL SHAPE: A VIRTUAL3D BASED MORPHOSPACE FOR PELARGONIUM
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Comments regarding this section were made throughout the annotated manuscript I am joining to this review.
Experimental design: Comments regarding this section were made throughout the annotated manuscript I am joining to this review.
Validity of the findings: Comments regarding this section were made throughout the annotated manuscript I am joining to this review.
Additional comments: This manuscript focuses on an interesting topic that deals with the usefulness of building a composite 3D dataset from a set of two 2D images for more representative geometric morphometrics of floral shape variation. In general, the manuscript is short, appropriately illustrated and straightforward to read. The hypotheses are clearly presented and the overall methods seem appropriate for the study.

I am enclosing a file containing all detailed comments as well as suggestions and corrections throughout the manuscript.

- Regarding the analyses, a section discussing ways to assess and take into account measurement error due to imaging (i.e. positioning the specimen before taking pictures) and digitizing (i.e. precision of acquiring landmarks) is missing here. Procrustes ANOVAs and ANOVA using centroid size can be used to assess the magnitude of measurement error due to imaging and digitizing versus the biological component of interest (e.g. variation among flowers or differences between left and right petals). This is an important step in GMM studies to ensure that the measured variation does not contain or contains a negligible amount of error. See for instance Savriama (2018) for a recent account on how to assess measurement error in floral shape

Savriama, Y. (2018). A Step-by-Step Guide For Geometric Morphometrics Of Floral Symmetry. Frontiers in plant science, 9, 1433.

- How is symmetry of the corolla taken into account here? According to the visualizations in Figure 4D and S4, the mean shapes are not symmetric indicating that zygomorphy was not taken into account at least with the method of bilateral object symmetry (Mardia et al. 2000, Savriama & Klingenberg 2011).
I had a look at the corresponding R script and there is no mention of such analysis either.
Given that symmetry is present in the studied species and that according to l.110-111: “ranges from highly zygomorphic (P. fulgidum) to almost actinomorphic (P. cotyledonis).”, I would have expected such important feature of floral shape to be taken into account here.
I would be very interested in seeing such analysis included in this manuscript specifically since the methods associated with bilateral object symmetry unambiguously separate a component of symmetric variation (i.e. variation among flowers) and the asymmetry (i.e. differences between left and right petals). For instance, a visually suspected actinomorphic variation in these flowers could be accurately detected and quantified using these approaches.
If asymmetry is not of interest then analyses can be carried solely on the component of symmetric variation which also further reduces the dimensionality of the data (Mardia et al. 2000, Berger et al. 2017). This additional point would be useful here given the high number of landmarks and semilandmarks used in the present work.

Berger, B. A., Ricigliano, V. A., Savriama, Y., Lim, A., Thompson, V., & Howarth, D. G. (2017). Geometric morphometrics reveals shifts in flower shape symmetry and size following gene knockdown of CYCLOIDEA and ANTHOCYANIDIN SYNTHASE. BMC plant biology, 17(1), 205.

Mardia, K. V., Bookstein, F. L., & Moreton, I. J. (2000). Statistical assessment of bilateral symmetry of shapes. Biometrika, 285-300.

Savriama, Y., & Klingenberg, C. P. (2011). Beyond bilateral symmetry: geometric morphometric methods for any type of symmetry. BMC evolutionary biology, 11(1), 280.

In my opinion, the manuscript is suitable for publication after these corrections as well as other points raised in the annotated manuscript I am joining to this review have been addressed.

Best wishes.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: DROUGHT-INDUCED REDUCTION IN METHANE FLUXES AND ITS HYDROTHERMAL SENSITIVITY IN ALPINE PEATLAND
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: This manuscript is well organized and present CH4 fluxes values from alpine peatlands in extreme drought conditions, however, considering that the main contribution to knowledge is how alpine peatlands respond under that conditions, it is not clear the importance of alpine peatlands or extreme drought events in the global context. The authors would put in context how representative alpine peatlands in worldwide are, and what is the incidence of extreme drought in peatlands. This would serve to make more interesting this manuscript.
I urge the authors to have a native English speaker edit the manuscript.
I would recommend the authors link 'Results' and 'Discussion' into one unique section to make manuscript more fluent.
I recommend improve the references, i.e. in line 50, I think that references 9-10 could be betters.
The authors no provide raw data from flux calculation.
Experimental design: Why the authors use transparent and dark chamber?
How do the authors ensure that the flux calculation is correct with only 2 minutes of measurement?
The authors take in to account the increasing of volume of the chamber due to length of pipe to calculate CH4 flux? The omission of that volume could underestimate the flux values up to a 20%, considering an inner pipe diameter of 2cm.
Validity of the findings: This manuscript offers nothing more than flux values. I feel the authors should find a way to present their findings in a more interesting manner so that they add more than simply fluxes and their relationship with some environmental parameters. As I mentioned previously, the authors could put in context how representative alpine peatlands are to other peatlands.
Additional comments: Some lines where the manuscript could be improved are 169, 172, 184, 185, 285.
I would recommend the authors link 'Results' and 'Discussion' into one unique section to make manuscript more fluent.
The Figure 5a does no show the R2 value.
The use of words “box” and “chamber” (lines115-116) is very confusing. The authors could be clearer in that section.
The influence of SWC appears twice, in line 172 and 181.
The correlation of SWC with CH4 flux could be synthetized, due to in both conditions and all depth analyzed had the same correlation.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: DROUGHT-INDUCED REDUCTION IN METHANE FLUXES AND ITS HYDROTHERMAL SENSITIVITY IN ALPINE PEATLAND
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: no comment
Experimental design: no comment
Validity of the findings: no comment
Additional comments: no comment


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: DROUGHT-INDUCED REDUCTION IN METHANE FLUXES AND ITS HYDROTHERMAL SENSITIVITY IN ALPINE PEATLAND
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: no comment
Experimental design: no comment
Validity of the findings: no comment
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM CAN ACHIEVE COMPARABLE RESULTS TO EXPERTS FOR BONE AGE ASSESSMENT OF CHINESE CHILDREN WITH ABNORMAL GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: This work describes a study using deep learning to predict bone age from X-ray images of the left hand, which is widely used in endocrinological assessment of delayed or accelerated growth in children. A database of 8000 Chinese children from 5 different Chinese clinics is used to train the deep learning model. It consists of X-ray images and the clinically reported bone age. For testing, a database of 745 further children from a different Chinese clinic is used, where bone age is assessed as consensus of two raters. The deep learning method is compared with this ground truth, leading to a mean absolute deviation of  0.58 years and an RMSE of 0.76 years.

The paper is reasonably well written and provides a good overall structure. However, a main concern is the rather superficial literature survey, which misses many relevant works in bone age assessment. Most importantly, the result of the recent RSNA bone age estimation challenge (doi: 10.1148/radiol.2018180736), which is based on the dataset of Larson et al., 2018, is entirely ignored in this work. However, at that challenge, a number of state of the art deep learning algorithms were discussed, many of them very similar to the method the authors propose in this work (and describe as a "new" fully automatic method). It is unclear how the proposed method relates to the methods presented there. There is also the work of Spampinato et al. in Medical Image Analysis and the extensive work of Thodberg et al. and van Rijn et al., which is entirely ignored in this paper, although these can be considered state of the art methods in bone age estimation, both for deep learning based and more traditional learning based approaches. Given that this work presumably is not in its first iteration as a journal submission, I see this neglectance of related work (indicated by the sentence in line 70: "To date, a few preliminary AI BA systems have been developed based on a standard database or radiographs from one or two medical centers in North America and Korea, with a test sample size of 200.", which in my opinion is very unfair given the huge amount of work Hans Henrik Thodberg has already invested into validating his commercially available BoneXpert methdod!) and the ignoring of the wider context of automated bone age estimation and its in the meantime quite extensive literature as hugely problematic, when assessing the quality of this work.

The claimed contributions of this work are firstly, that a new fully automated AI system for BA assessment is developed (stated throughout the manuscript), and secondly, that it is dedicated to Chinese children, since growth and development may differ from those ethnicities that were used for other previously developed machine learning approaches. While I agree that the second contribution is very relevant - the ethnical differences are indeed an interesting topic to study - the first issue is not a contribution for two reasons. 1. The proposed method using a Residual Net for localization of age relevant structures and a Residual Net for age prediction is not novel. 2. It is not clear why we need yet another proposed deep learning method for bone age assessment from X ray images, given that there are so many around already (see above, especially those from the RSNA challenge), and that the authors do not indicate, what distinguishes their method from the state of the art, and how their method performs on the publicly available datasets that can be used for comparison. Therefore, I do not think that the hypotheses stated in this work are demonstrated through a convincing experimental setup (see also 2. Experimental design).
Experimental design: There are a number of detailed concerns that I have regarding this work:

- Ethically, I would prefer that the ethics committee of the university approves the use of the data for this retrospective study. The currently uploaded document is not convincing me that the ethical prerequisites are fulfilled. Just because the dataset is retrospective and anonymized does not mean that the ethical committee should not still approve this study. We have received this approval by our ethics committee for our studies, and also e.g. Larson et al., Radiology 2018 describe that use of their retrospective dataset was approved by the local ethics committee.

- In this work there is no description of the characteristics of the training dataset used for the deep learning approach. It is solely stated that 8000 images from five centers were used. No information on the age distribution, how the reference standard was obtained, the sex characteristics or the diagnostic information (as in Table 1 for the test dataset) is available. Therefore it is hard to judge if the dataset was appropriate for training. Also no information on the hyperparameters, their tuning and the use of a validation set for this tuning is given. Since we have to trust that no test image was ever used during the development of the proposed deep learning algorithm, it would be more reassuring to see on which data the hyperparameter tuning was performed. Otherwise one has to assume that hyperparameter tuning was done on the test set, thus leading to results that would poorly generalize to future new datasets.

- The reference standard section describes the generation of the test set's reference standard as the consensus of two reviewers who were unblinded from sex and age information. The knowledge of the chronological age, however, is not valid for creating this reference standard, since the aim of bone age assessment is exactly to determine the difference to chronological age (which would be the average age of "normal" development) in order to assess endocrinological disorders. Also Larson et al., 2018 make it very clear that their reference standard was developed blinded to chronological age information. I see this as a severe limitation of the generated reference standard, and additionally, the design of the crucial reference standard is lacking compared to the effort put into this difficult step e.g. by Larson et al., 2018 and Halabi et al., Radiology 2019 (4 assessors, one additional assessment after some time, correction for rater bias).

- It is entirely unclear how the landmark localization pre-processing depicted in Fig. 1 works. This is a crucial step, since errors in this step will have a severe impact on the age estimation error. A very vague description of the use of residual networks for landmark localization is given, however, this strategy is not a state of the art method in landmark localization, where recently heatmap regression approaches and U Net like structures are seeing a lot of attention. Furthermore, the landmark localization approach is difficult to implement given the wide age range of children that have to be assessed (6-18 years). This is mentioned in the manuscript, but not discussed as to how it impacts the landmark localization!

- The discussion of the limitations of the proposed method is not very extensive, however, it would add important insights of the study outcome.
Validity of the findings: The proposed results are not properly embedded into the related work, especially not compared on the publicly available databases to give the context and to justify the reason why a new fully automatic algorithm has to be developed, instead of using an existing one that was already shown to be suitable for bone age assessment. This makes it hard to compare the proposed method on the new dataset of Chinese children, and it makes it hard to judge the specific properties of the newly collected dataset. In addition to this, the Bland Altman plot with its very large deviation in the form of the 95% limits of agreement does not convince me that the proposed method is a clinically suitable bone age predictor, despite the claims made in this work. Presumably, this error is in practice too large to justify automatic processing. However, given that the reference standard was determined by "approximately two minutes on average" of investigating the X ray image (see line 168), this prediction error may also come from the reference standard itself, as mentioned in section 2 (experimental design). This makes it hard to judge the result on the challenging test dataset that is used in this study.

Overall, while I applaud the collection of the large database of training and testing images, and the effort put into validating deep learning based age estimation on a different ethnicity, I do not think that the presented study is thorough enough to justify publication. Since it is not possible to reproduce results due to the lack of training and testing database, the data annotation and the code of the proposed method, the quality of the experiments supporting the claimed hypothesis have to be of a very high standard to be convincing. I do not see this important prerequisite demonstrated in the presented study.
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM CAN ACHIEVE COMPARABLE RESULTS TO EXPERTS FOR BONE AGE ASSESSMENT OF CHINESE CHILDREN WITH ABNORMAL GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: The authors present a good and interesting article on application of soft computing techniques to predict the bone age of Chinese children with abnormal growth and development. This topic is relevant considering the importance of elimination of time-consuming consultation necessary to analysis.

The manuscript demonstrates that the authors understand relevant literatures enough in the field of application of soft computing algorithms to investigate growth and development of children. The existing literature is up-to-date and it is well cited (However, I recommend to replace citations before the "." in the text, for instance, line 66, 69, 143, 223, 226, 229, 237, 257, 264, 266, 268, 269 ...).

In general, the used statistical analysis and artificial intelligence-based models are suitable, and the presentation of the results is very clear. The structure of this paper and the quality of figures are very good (I just recommend to modify in Figure 2 from yeas to years).

The raw data are correctly shared.

Therefore, I recommend this paper for publication in the journal after solving some minor issues previously mentioned.
Experimental design: This research is very interesting and falling within the scope of the journal. The experiments are well designed. The database is well collected and preprocessed, providing sufficient information. The age of patient is well distributed from 4 to 14 years. The experiments providing by two experienced reviewers are very good, allowing independent confrontations for the AI model. The materials and methods are described with sufficient detail and information to replicate by other researchers.

Therefore, I highly appreciate the materials and methods section of this paper.
Validity of the findings: The results are statistically analyzed. The discussion section is well given, including limitations of this work. The authors also attempt to control extreme cases, this is very good. The results of the AI model is compared with manual investigations from independent investigators, proving the relevant contribution of this work in reducing labor requirement.

The proposed methodology of this paper is very useful. I recommend the authors to improve the accuracy of the AI model and supply it to the field of Health Sciences as an additional robust tools.
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM CAN ACHIEVE COMPARABLE RESULTS TO EXPERTS FOR BONE AGE ASSESSMENT OF CHINESE CHILDREN WITH ABNORMAL GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Compared with the previous version of the paper, where the literature review was insufficient, the manuscript has made a big step in terms of being embedded in the current literature. The overall quality of the paper is now suitable for publication.
Experimental design: The authors have done a very good job in rebuttling the criticisms regarding experimental design. The issues on clarity of the training setup, the algorithm used for predictions, and the concerns regarding the performance in the context of the related work, as well as the doubts about the reference standard were clarified. The original criticism regarding the knowledge of chronological age for constructing the reference standard and for the limited time spent with an image to create the Greulich Pyle based reading were probably too harsh, and I have reconsidered these through reading the rebuttal.

There is still one issue that I would like to mention, after reading the new manuscript and the rebuttal. It requires some refined discussion in a potential final revision:

- The use of regions of interest extracted before performing age prediction solely on those regions is not novel, and is in my opinion not strong enough to support a granted patent. While this idea has been pioneered by Tanner and Whitehouse already in an attempt to improve the traditional atlas method of Greulich and Pyle, it was later also used by BoneXpert through their statistical shape model approach or by Pietka et al., 2004 in J Digital Imag. Very recently this idea was also demonstrated in deep learning based age estimation from MRI by Stern et al., IEEE JBHI 2019 or Stern et al., Medical Image Analysis 2019, where anatomical landmarks are localized using heatmap regression (see Payer et al., Medical Image Analysis 2019).

Actually, I think the novelty claim of the proposed method is probably not very important for this manuscript, since it should focus on the study of the Chinese population, including the separate dataset for final thorough validation and generalization. This is the strongest point of this work. Nevertheless, I find it important that the methodological state-of-the-art is reflected in its entirety.
Validity of the findings: Overall, compared to the previous revision, I am now convinced that the findings are valid, and very relevant to be reported.
Additional comments: There are a few grammar mistakes that were introduced in the revised version. I would suggest another proofread.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: PREDICTION OF ANTIVIRAL DRUGS AGAINST AFRICAN SWINE FEVER VIRUSES BASED ON PROTEIN–PROTEIN INTERACTION ANALYSIS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: In abstract please define AIPs;

In introduction please:
1) add additional references presenting commercial drugs with anti-ASFV proprieties (e.g. 10.1016/j.antiviral.2016.08.021; 10.1016/j.vetmic.2013.01.018) and also in the discussion section (anti-topoisomerase poisons;
2) clarify the possible role of antivirals in the ASFV context (including outbreaks);
3) line 61: describe "multiple sources";

Also in discussion, references of drugs acting against cell proteins (e.g. ubiquitin-proteasome system, HDACs), with anti-ASFV-proprieties should be citated (e.g. 10.1371/journal.pone.0189741; 10.1016/j.virusres.2017.09.009)
Experimental design: The manuscript is in the scope of the Journal. Research question is well defined and  relevant. Although, in M&M section please:
1) justify the used theresolds levels for e-value;
Validity of the findings: To support the data, it will be very interesting if the authors could perform some in vitro assays with Geldanamycin using swine cells
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: PREDICTION OF ANTIVIRAL DRUGS AGAINST AFRICAN SWINE FEVER VIRUSES BASED ON PROTEIN–PROTEIN INTERACTION ANALYSIS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: I find that these results are interesting but authors should take the effort to discuss them further in the context of the previous literature, that is  very specific for those interactions found. With some more work, the manuscript will improve significantly.  A clear professional English is used in this manuscript. However, in the text, abbreviations that do not belong to the common usage for scientific readers such as PPIs, AAPs or AIPs should be avoided. These could be used in Figures instead.
Your Introduction lacks citation of important works in antivirals against ASFV I suggest that you improve your review of the current literature and at least include the following references: Galindo et al. doi: 10.1016/j.antiviral.2011.04.013 and Hernaez et al. doi: 10.1128/JVI.01168-10

In Intro section, you should substitute Citation #1 and #9. #1 should be better cited with a publication related with ASFV virology such as ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profile: Asfarviridae Journal of General Virology doi 10.1099/jgv.0.001049
Overall the manuscript, authors rather reference publications related to other viruses instead ASFV.
Figures are relevant and high quality but could be better labeled and described in figure legends and results. A really good adding to this manuscript could be to include the references that previously described the interactions that they curated in the Figure 1.
It could be useful for readers to include a description of the main interactions and the corresponding citations:
Ep152R could be related with its reference: Borca M.V., V. O’Donnell, L.G. Holinka, D.K. Rai, B. Stanford, M. Alfano, J. Carlson, P.A. Azzinaro, C. Alonso and D.P. Gladue. 2016. The Ep152R ORF of African swine fever virus strain Georgia encodes for an essential gene that interacts with host protein BAG6. Virus Research 223: 181-189
DP71L could be related to its references: Rivera J., C Abrahams, B Hernaez, A Alcázar, L Dixon, J M. Escribano and C Alonso. 2007. The MyD116-African Swine Fever viral homologue interacts with the catalytic subunit of protein phosphatase-1 and activates its phosphatase activity. Journal of Virology 81 (6): 2923- 2929.
A179L: *Brun A., C. Rivas, M. Esteban, J.M. Escribano and C. Alonso.  African swine fever virus gene A179L, a viral homologue of bcl-2, protects cells from programmed cell death. Virology 225, 227- 230, 1996. *Galindo I., B. Hernáez, G. Díaz-Gil, J.M. Escribano and C. Alonso. 2008. A179L, a viral Bcl-2 homologue, targets the core Bcl-2 apoptotic machinery and its upstream BH3 activators with selective binding restrictions for Bid and Noxa. Virology Vol 375(5): 561-572.
P54: Alonso C., J. Miskin, B. Hernáez, P. Fernandez-Zapatero, L. Soto, C. Cantó, I. Rodríguez-Crespo, L. Dixon, J.M. Escribano. 2001. The African swine fever virus protein p54 interacts with the microtubule motor complex through direct binding to light chain dynein. Journal of Virology 75 (20), 9819 -9827.
P30 Hernáez B., J M. Escribano and C Alonso. 2008. The African swine fever virus protein p30 interacts with the heterogeneous ribonucleoprotein K (hnRNP-K) during infection. FEBS Letters 582, 3275–3280, 2008.
A238L could be related with its references, which are several: Miskin JE, Abrams CC, Goatley LC, Dixon LK. A viral mechanism for inhibition of the cellular phosphatase calcineurin. Science. 1998 Jul 24;281(5376):562-5.
A224L Nogal ML, González de Buitrago G, Rodríguez C, Cubelos B, Carrascosa AL, Salas ML, Revilla Y. African swine fever virus IAP homologue inhibits caspase activation and promotes cell survival in mammalian cells. J Virol. 2001 75(6):2535-43.
Experimental design: The research is within the scope of the Journal and the research question is well very relevant and meaningful. Methods are described in detail but some more explanations for the non-expert reader would be desirable.
The results presented are interesting but lack any proof of the antiviral activity of the drugs, hence the sentence in lines 243-244 is overestimating the relevance of the results shown in this manuscript. Results require further explanations to the non-specialist reader in topological analysis.
Validity of the findings: The impact and novelty of the findings is good and relevant to the field. Data are statistically sound and controlled. Conclusions are good.
Additional comments: Your Introduction lacks citation of important works in antivirals against ASFV I suggest that you improve your review of the current literature and at least include the following references: Galindo et al. doi: 10.1016/j.antiviral.2011.04.013 and Hernaez et al. doi: 10.1128/JVI.01168-10

In Intro section, you should substitute Citation #1 and #9. #1 should be better cited with a publication related with ASFV virology such as ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profile: Asfarviridae Journal of General Virology doi 10.1099/jgv.0.001049
Overall the manuscript, authors rather reference publications related to other viruses instead ASFV.
Figures are relevant and high quality but could be better labeled and described in figure legends and results. A really good adding to this manuscript could be to include the references that previously described the interactions that they curated in the Figure 1.
It could be useful for readers to include a description of the main interactions and the corresponding citations:
Ep152R could be related with its reference: Borca M.V., V. O’Donnell, L.G. Holinka, D.K. Rai, B. Stanford, M. Alfano, J. Carlson, P.A. Azzinaro, C. Alonso and D.P. Gladue. 2016. The Ep152R ORF of African swine fever virus strain Georgia encodes for an essential gene that interacts with host protein BAG6. Virus Research 223: 181-189
DP71L could be related to its references: Rivera J., C Abrahams, B Hernaez, A Alcázar, L Dixon, J M. Escribano and C Alonso. 2007. The MyD116-African Swine Fever viral homologue interacts with the catalytic subunit of protein phosphatase-1 and activates its phosphatase activity. Journal of Virology 81 (6): 2923- 2929.
A179L: *Brun A., C. Rivas, M. Esteban, J.M. Escribano and C. Alonso.  African swine fever virus gene A179L, a viral homologue of bcl-2, protects cells from programmed cell death. Virology 225, 227- 230, 1996. *Galindo I., B. Hernáez, G. Díaz-Gil, J.M. Escribano and C. Alonso. 2008. A179L, a viral Bcl-2 homologue, targets the core Bcl-2 apoptotic machinery and its upstream BH3 activators with selective binding restrictions for Bid and Noxa. Virology Vol 375(5): 561-572.
P54: Alonso C., J. Miskin, B. Hernáez, P. Fernandez-Zapatero, L. Soto, C. Cantó, I. Rodríguez-Crespo, L. Dixon, J.M. Escribano. 2001. The African swine fever virus protein p54 interacts with the microtubule motor complex through direct binding to light chain dynein. Journal of Virology 75 (20), 9819 -9827.
P30 Hernáez B., J M. Escribano and C Alonso. 2008. The African swine fever virus protein p30 interacts with the heterogeneous ribonucleoprotein K (hnRNP-K) during infection. FEBS Letters 582, 3275–3280, 2008.
A238L could be related with its references, which are several: Miskin JE, Abrams CC, Goatley LC, Dixon LK. A viral mechanism for inhibition of the cellular phosphatase calcineurin. Science. 1998 Jul 24;281(5376):562-5.
A224L Nogal ML, González de Buitrago G, Rodríguez C, Cubelos B, Carrascosa AL, Salas ML, Revilla Y. African swine fever virus IAP homologue inhibits caspase activation and promotes cell survival in mammalian cells. J Virol. 2001 75(6):2535-43.
The manuscript results interesting but lack any proof of the antiviral activity of the drugs, hence the sentence in lines 243-244 is overestimating the relevance of the results shown in this manuscript. Results require further explanations to the non-specialist reader in topological analysis.
Discussion is rather scarce and it should emphasize previous work on antivirals, given the fact that the list is not so large to resolve it adding “and so on”. Authors should search the literature for those and use the list given above.
The authors should discuss the induction of apoptosis by this virus in vivo and in vitro and include the appropriate references, not in other virus infections. However, they have included reference 30, which is clearly wrong. They should include the following: Ramiro-Ibanez et al, 1996 doi: 10.1099/0022-1317-77-9-2209 and Galindo et al, 2012 doi: 10.1038/cddis.2012.81
Also, when discussing TNF, it should be important to include the reference: Gomez del Moral M., E. Ortuño, P. Fernandez-Zapatero, F. Alonso, C. Alonso, A. Ezquerra and J. Dominguez. African swine fever virus infection induces tumor necrosis factor alpha production: Implications in pathogenesis. Journal of Virology 73: 2173-2180, 1999
Reference number 20 is wrong. In the manuscript, I have highlighted some mistakes in yellow.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: INTERACTION EFFECTS OF AGING, WORD FREQUENCY, AND PREDICTABILITY ON SACCADE LENGTH IN CHINESE READING
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The writing is generally easy to follow but it weak in some sections, including when the predictions and presented, and would benefit from a revision by a native or highly skilled English language user.

The authors need also to write for non-expert audiences. They use technical expressions such as gaze duration in the abstract without explanation and need also to detail what is measured by the different eye movement metrics they use.

The authors also use technical terms such as Skip.pro rather than transparent terms when discussing findings. They should revise the use of this technical language to describe what they find more clearly.

The hypotheses are focused on saccade metric effects. Effects on reading times for words are also reported and the effects described here were in principle predictable in advance based on previous research. The manuscript would be stronger with predictions for these effects included. Without encouraging HARKing, it should be possible to include predictions for these measures that would follow from the previous Chinese research reviewed in the manuscript.

The manuscript reports only word-level findings. It would also be beneficial, both to establish that the older adults are typical of older readers in other research and to provide data for meta-analysis, to report age differences in basic sentence-level effects. As above, it should be possible to generate straightforward predictions based on previous research findings without encouraging HARKing.

With respect to the review of the prior literature, the manuscript is overly focused on saccadic effects and should say more about reading time effects. With reference to predictability effects, it needs to review recent research looking at age differences in such effects in alphabetic languages (Choi et at., 2017, Psychology and Aging; Steen-Baker et al., 2017, Psychology and Aging; Zhao et al., 2019, Psychology and Aging).

Article structure is generally good although the Discussion is a little weak and could be more clearly structured around the different aspects of the findings. There is appropriate use of tables and figures.

The table showing example sentences should include the sentences in Chinese as well as the translations into English.

The reporting of statistical findings is difficult to follow and requires greater clarity. I would suggest removing the statistics to a table and then clearly explaining the pattern of effects in the text. The absence of predictions make this section difficult to follow. There appears to be an age-group x frequency interaction, which would replicate previous findings. This should be clearer. By comparison, there does not appear to an age-group x predictability interaction, which is inconsistent with previous findings. This needs to be clear too. I would suggest reporting the regression-path / go-past measure as several recent studies show age differences in predictability effects in this measure which may be evidence for age differences in sentence integration effects (Steen-Baker et a., 2017, Psychology and Aging; Zhao et al., 2019, Psychology and Aging).

The complex interaction effect in saccade length for age group and frequency requires more detailed explanation. What does it show and how do the statistics support that interpretation?

The reviewers need to discuss their findings more clearly in relation to previous investigations of age differences in effects of frequency and predictability on reading. It's unfortunate that a study was published only very recently showing an age difference in predictability effects in Chinese reading (Zhao et al., 2019). They should consider their findings with respect to this study.

The patterns of findings concerning saccade metrics need to be investigated more carefully (see comments above) but also described more clearly in the discussion section and linked to the conclusions more precisely. At present the link is rather vague and leads to a very general conclusion.
Experimental design: The target word stimuli appear to be well constructed.

The research questions are well-defined. However, there are weaknesses to the hypotheses as noted above. The study provides an important attempt to replicate key findings, an original investigation of the combined effects of aging, predictability and frequency and an original investigation of these effects on localised saccade metrics.

The eye-tracker has a relatively low spatial and temporal resolution for the questions that are being addressed. I would like this difference in methods compared to other studies to at least be acknowledged in the manuscript.

Methods generally are described in sufficient detail. However, in a study focused on saccade metrics involved in incoming saccade effects of word frequency and predictability, we need to know about the characteristics of the word(s) to the left of the target word, as these will mediate such effects. This information is absent from the report and so it not possible to interpret the saccadic findings clearly.
Validity of the findings: There was a marked difference in comprehension scores for the two age groups, with older readers scoring an average 77% accuracy. This is worrying. The authors attempt to address this but I remain concerned. How many older adults scored less than 70% correct? The possibility that older readers may have experienced basic comprehension difficulty needs to be taken seriously and acknowledged when discussing findings.

The findings with respect to reading times for words are valid and interesting. These show an interaction between age group and word frequency that replicates previous findings. The absence of an interaction between age group and predictability is interesting and counter to previous findings. It would be interesting to know if this effect is still null if untransformed (rather than log-transformed data) are examined. I would suggest reporting both transformed and untransformed analyses for completeness.

The saccade metrics are difficult to interpret because launch site of incoming saccades is not known nor the characteristics of the preceding words. Similarly, the launch site of the outgoing saccade is also not reported but may systematically vary across young and older adults. These should be reported. The findings are also likely to be affected by the higher re-fixation rates of the older adults. Such issues should be considered carefully in the Discussion.
Additional comments: No additional comments