Talk:Psycholinguistics/Articulatory Phonetics

By far my biggest concern with this chapter is the lack of citations. The text is for the most part quite well-written, but barely any of your statements are backed up with evidence through citations. Furthermore, it seems like you haven’t used any primary sources, and are using only linguistics textbooks for your information. The whole point of this is to engage with primary literature ourselves and synthesize it into a new secondary source, not summarize an existing secondary source. Maybe you did do a lot of primary research and just haven’t put it into your citations yet, but the reader should know the context of your information, how it developed, and what the current situation is in this field. I don’t really see any of that. There’s a lot of really interesting information here, but it seems to all be third-hand, which makes it frustrating to review!

The other issue I noticed was with the structure of the chapter: overall, it was well-organized, but there were many instances (as I’ve mentioned above) where you discussed or referred to concepts that you hadn’t yet defined, leaving the reader confused. You are a guide leading your reader through a warren of potentially unintelligible information, and the reader should work to understand and apply the information you give them, not work to find the information in the first place! As specific examples, the whole section on cardinal vowels is out of place – it should come after the information on height and fronting. As well, the reader can’t “note that even with high vowels, the tongue is nowhere near as high as it would be for a stop or fricative consonant” if you haven’t talked about consonants yet; likewise, when you talk about diphthongs, throwing around terms like “the vowel equivalent of either affricates or consonant clusters” doesn’t make sense unless the information is presented in the right order.

One thing that would be really, really helpful in cases where defining every term would be too tedious (or in addition to defining terms!) is to put in wikilinks to the relevant articles (e.g. for “pulmonary consonant” the first time you use it). I put in links to the wikipedia articles that were originally linked in the header of the consonant chart, but expanding those terms would also be helpful, room permitting: you may know what Palv. and Ret. stand for, but the reader probably doesn’t! As well, I found the handmade diagrams and examples of the different types of sounds really helpful for understanding, and those should be added (as much as possible) to the sections lacking them.

The tone and focus of the chapter were both very well-done. The style of writing was appropriate and at the right introductory-yet-scientific level, and the information provided was on-topic and useful for this specific area of linguistics. However, there were some times when your wording was ambiguous or contradictory. It would be worthwhile to read through your chapter from the perspective of a beginner and note those places. Particular examples I noticed include the definition of a vowel: in the introduction you state that vowels are distinguished by the placement of the tongue, then later say that they are defined by mouth shape. As well, in the section on stops, you state that they “can be released fully, or direct the air not out of the mouth, but into the next sound,” but then say that they “are released either into a vowel or another stop” in the affricatives section. Can they be fully released in speech or not? Which is accurate?

A few miscellaneous comments: first of all, I love the fact that you included an epigraph. I put in line breaks for ease of reading, but that’s just a formatting issue. I may borrow this idea for my own chapter… Also, a chapter summary of some sort would be a good way to make sure the reader knows what the most important points are. I also find that the practice of putting a list of relevant links and related topics at the end of Wikipedia articles is really useful (see an example here).

--jnvincent 05:25, 22 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your insightful comments. I'll try to consider them carefully as I rewrite the chapter. One problem with using primary sources in a chapter like Articulatory phonetics is that the manners of speech production really haven't changed all that much since primary research was conducted over a century ago.  Languages have been found that make use of previously un-used combinations of manner and place, but no real new manners or places are being investigated.  That said, I will go further into the literature to provide some sense of "where this is coming from", and expand my references as necessary.
 * Secondly, your comments about the ordering of the article are well-noted, and a problem I found myself dealing with on a consistent basis. How do you refer to alveolar stops in the section on alveolar articulation if you haven't mentioned stops, and how do you do the same in the section on stops if you haven't mentioned the Alveolar Ridge?  I'm trying to think of a way to present the information that is less circularly dependent, but I'm not there yet.  Similarly, vowels are notable because they differ from consonants, and vice versa.  Consonants are probably simpler to describe: manner and place of articulation, with very distinct differences between them, so they should perhaps come first.  As I said, I'll carefully consider all suggestions as I rework this chapter into something that is both easier to read and more obviously researched.  Thank you, Aericanwizard 18:02, 22 February 2011 (UTC)