Talk:Psycholinguistics/Components of Speech

Peer Review
I like that you listed what you will be discussing in the introduction, but it seems a bit incomplete. Maybe a bit more of a discussion on exactly what the components of speech are or their importance might be a nice addition to your intro?

Your page is very informative! A couple of suggestions that may help the reader to understand the information better and make it more interesting is if it were laid out differently, i.e. pictures, subheadings, tables ,etc. The paragraphs within the subheadings need a bit more distinction as the paragraph breaks are confusing without it. Bolding or even italicizing some key words may also help break the paragraphs up and signal to the reader some of the more important parts of the section. (For example, in the section on “Phonological rules”, you have a sentence stating, “The specific rules that outline the permissible combinations of phonemes are called phonotactic rules” You might want to consider highlighting or italicizing phonotactic rules.   I also corrected a bit of grammar issues but touched the original copy only minimally.

In reference to the suprasegmantal section: Overall, it is a very informative section and I especially liked the way it was wrapped up in the closing paragraph. I’m wondering if adding an audio clip of a computerized sentence free of human speech qualities might spruce it up. You can find out how to format this type of file to your page at: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Help:Media. Another thing I found that could be taken as confusing is the first paragraph in which you speak of prosodic cues. It may be the wording that seems odd to me, but it also may need a *very brief* explanation on prosodic cues and what they are before jumping into them as suprasegmental properties.

The other sections are very good, but like I said before, they could use a little sprucing up. The section on ASL would be great with some pictures, especially to demonstrate hand configuration and its importance to the language or maybe even a picture of someone signing “mother” compared to someone signing “father” when you bring it up in the text. Also in the sign language section, the part in brackets in the following sentence seems redundant: “When signs in ASL differ only on one aspect the two can be considered to be a minimal pair (differing only in one contrastive aspect)”

As a whole, your page is full of important information and the main subheadings seem quite appropriate. However, it seems as though you are following the textbook too closely so some extra sources would be helpful to your chapter. The other major critique I have, as already stated, is the presentation and the lack of supplemental information to help with further understanding. It might be hard to find pictures to help out with your sections (with the exception of the section on ASL), but it might be worth looking into seeing if it is possible to add audio clips, which would make it much more interactive. Also remember to properly link your information to the sources that you have used in the reference section.

Aslwin 19:33, 27 February 2011 (UTC)