Author's response to reviews Title:Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Prolonged Grief in Refugees Exposed to Trauma and Loss Authors:

1. In the methods section, the authors state that they have measured English proficiency in the sample. However, not much is done with this data in the manuscript. Therefore, I suggest to delete this from the text or include results of this measurement. Otherwise, the sample may have been exposed to unnecessary measurements, which is not ethically sound. We appreciate Reviewer #1’s comments. We investigated English proficiency as a predictor in the regression analyses. We believe it is an important variable to be considered due to the documented links between proficiency in the host country language and mental health (e.g., Steel et al., 2002; Takeuchi et al., 2007). However, our results indicated that English proficiency was not a significant predictor of class membership. One possible explanation for this is that stress related to poor English proficiency was encapsulated by the other living difficulties subscales. We have noted this in the discussion (page 14, paragraph 2). It is notable that English proficiency did not predict membership in any of the symptomatic classes, despite research suggesting that proficiency in the language of the host country is associated with poorer mental health outcomes [1, 2]. It may be that the difficulties encompassed in the adaptation subscale (i.e., communication difficulties) encapsulated the effect of poor English proficiency. 2. The conclusions section should be rewritten, and become more specific as of the study’s results, and appealing for the readers. In its current form, I find it too superficial, it does not reflect properly the importance of the study. SCHOOL OF PSYCHOLOGY