- You wrote a really good article ! I think you used hyperlinks in the right spots so that the readers could get some more information if they needed.
- I also really liked the idea of using a table to outline the studies. It was a good idea to get the main points of the studies across and to outline the major findings in each study.
- One thing that I found a bit confusing was the taxonomic assumption. I had a bit of trouble understanding the sentences that you wrote, if you could try re-wording the bit on taxonomic assumption, it might be a bit easier for readers to understand.
- In the past research where you were talking about social pragmatics, the wording is a bit confusing. (the part where you say "infants reject known objects because of social pragmatics' to 'they must want me to look at the unfamiliar object'). Maybe you should word it along the lines of “ Using the pragmatic account, children tend to assume that if an adult does not point or gesture to an object, they are referring to the novel object. This account emphasizes that children expect adults to gesture or point to familiar objects, and when no gesturing occurs, the child assumes that they are referring to the novel object.”
- I believe this was what you were trying to explain, but I may have gotten mixed up, the wording for this aspect was a bit confusing to me to try and grasp.
- When you start talking about the lexical contrast principle, it almost seems like you backspaced and forgot to add in more words. I made a change to the following sentence : “On the other hand, the principle of contrast proposes infants avoid synonyms as labels for objects”, and changed it to “On the other hand, the principle of lexical contrast proposes that infants avoid synonyms as labels for objects”. Pretty small change, but it didn't really make sense to me the way you had it before.
- When you are talking about the novelty paradigm, I would add in that ‘infants may simply choose the unfamiliar object based simply on their interest in this new object” , maybe just to make the assumption a bit clearer as to what you mean about being “based on novelty alone”.
- For the exclusivity paradigm, is the label of ‘wug’ given to one of the objects? So the child is told that one of the objects is called a wug, and then they are asked which object is called a ‘jig’? If so, maybe try to modify the sentence to explain this a bit better and make it a bit clearer.
Overall, I thought your article was really well done! The only comments I have are small sentence rearrangements that might make the concepts a bit easier for readers to understand.
- Alyssa Mantini
I really enjoyed reading this article and I think it is well written. But, I do find some parts confusing like when you talked about taxonomic assumptions and social pragmatics. If you could break it down and come down to a more basic level.
Alyssa has made very good recommendations and I agree with everything especially on the change suggested in the pragmatics section.
One other thing that I would like to add is that it would have been great if you included the names of researches in the table. I like the table idea, it made it very easy to understand and I think if you make the changes suggested above, this would be an incredible article.
-Amara Okoye