Talk:Psycholinguistics/Pidgins, Creoles, and Home Sign

Category
Should this be in a category? --LauraHale 06:25, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

editing assignment
Your section is part of the Language acquisition topic, so making that play a larger role in your introduction might be beneficial. It is only mentioned in a question at the end, but you use it throughout. The innate aspect of language should also probably be mentioned with more prominence. Introducing the questions explicitly as what you are going to look at would help, as well as mentioning what purpose the case study will serve.

For the Pidgins and Creole section, the heading "definition" has far too long an article. Possibly have a box with the definitions for each, and then something about the historical cases. A new heading for the different classifications would also fit in well. Where you end the section that mentions a possible internal mechanism, mentioning the case of the bioprogram would make sense, even if you are about to start the next paragraph. It also lets you cite something there, because as it is, it appears to be a novel claim made by you.

Your bioprogram section looks well cited, and well written, but are there any connections that can be drawn to other forms of research? Chomsky’s language acquisition device? Any conflicting theories that challenge the idea of a “genetically coded program for language specific to humans”? possibly looking at an idea that is not a direct program? Constraint induced?

The Home Sign section starts with a good summary introduction, replicating this for the Pidgins and Creoles section would help quite a bit. For the next section, again a box around the definition would make it more dynamic and help with reading. This whole section is very good in general, however, the use of the personal experience that appears near the end is a little out of place. Possibly putting it in a new paragraph, or even making it a generalization might work better (a lot of people probably do the same thing, and if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be a good example).

The NSL section has lots of good information, but looks like just a wall of text, which is a little difficult to deal with on a wikipage. The width is a little difficult to deal with, and most textbooks don't even us the whole page. This is an issue with the page in general, but really needs to be addressed here.

In general, your page could use some accessibility, which could be achieved by a number of methods. The main one is Pictures! Of signing, of people from a Creole speaking country, of fingers making scissor motion, anything really. Wikipages are dead boring without them. Another way of breaking up the page would be double spacing paragraphs, making them easier to read and to skim, which is generally important for textbook information. Adding more sub- or sub-subheadings could probably help with breaking this up as well. Please add a conclusion that sums up what these two topics have to say about language acquisition, bringing out the innateness of language would wrap the section up nicely.

I edited some of your headings to make them accessible from the index at the top. Also, references, as a general wikipedia style, should have electronic links if possible, or at least DOI's.

Overall the chapter is very informative, and addressing the ease of reading would make the information more accessible to the readers. Trying to read this is probably an example of how irritating bad wikis can be. the prohibition against pointform, and fear of what subheadings might been interpreted as, prevented me from following through on my suggestions. Bcorrigan 16:37, 27 February 2011 (UTC)