User talk:Knowlin4/sandbox

Comments

• Your article is very good, I really only have a few formatting comments. You should make sure your headings are uniform and instead of saying things like "evidence for" it should say evidence for the hypothesis or for syntactic bootstrapping.
• You should also be sure that you link to other articles where ever you can.
• Also you cite things like you would in a paper I don't think you need to include the year when you mention different studies. Rebeccacm (talk) 21:58, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Some notes while reading what we have:

• Should "Other Concerns" and "Evidence Against" be combined? There's some crossover, especially in the prosodic vs. syntactic bootstrapping argument for head-directionality.
• Our additions to the "Challenges across languages" section looks fine but the work we're carrying over from the existing article is really confusing. We should clean this up if we intend to keep this section. JordanAMSmith (talk) 20:23, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Possible Gleitman Source?

Language and Experience, Evidence from the Blind Child, 1985

• P118 .L24 1985

Section on Syntax is about p. 120 I think

Gleitman's encyclopedia entry:

• Encyclopedia of Language Development, ed. Patria Brooks, Vera Kempe. Entry: "Syntactic Bootstrapping". For whatever reason there are no page numbers.

JordanAMSmith (talk) 16:46, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks, everyone, for your feedback! LiaK (talk) 15:36, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

Review

• The overall organization is well presented, all sections are relevant and there don't seem to be any major parts of syntactic bootstrapping that were left out. The "challenges across language" seems to work, though it would be good to expand on the last point at the very end. Couldn't find the section "other concerns".
• "How do children do this, though, when their surroundings do not give specific enough context for word learning?[3] The theory of syntactic bootstrapping seeks to give explanation to the phenomenon of child language acquisition." In general, it seems better to not use questions in an article, even if it's rhetorical or followed by an answer. For these particular sentences, it would seem better to combine them into one statement, instead of a question and an answer (I think there were a few other like this too later on, such as under "poverty of the stimulus").
• This isn't necessarily something to change, but the way the article is written appears more like an essay than a wikipedia article such as in the last sentence of the introduction (sounds sort of like a thesis statement) . This doesn't affect comprehension in anyway, nor shows any bias, but it's just a note on the wording.
• Experiments and logic were summed up well, and related back to the topic/section.MegaloNickoloff (talk) 20:18, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

Review

Decently presented overall; You have a lot of really good information on this page. The organization is a little odd, but you all did a great job of explaining some important concepts. Personally, I would combine your "Evidence against" and "challenges across languages" sections, or at least bring them closer together in some way since they seem to go hand-in-hand. The "challenges" section just seems a little off with the current format (ie: The third challenge is... -> the answer to this problem is...). Maybe instead of directly saying the answer, say "So and so counters this by claiming..." or something along those lines. As mentioned above, the article does seem a little essay-like, but I think that will be fixed with time. Jtwelsh (talk) 23:31, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

Review

I am not quite clear on your organization, you present evidence against the hypothesis before you really explain the hypothesis, you also have a lot evidence in the logic section. The formatting now makes it look like there isn't much evidence so you may want to consider reorganizing that. I think the challenges section could maybe have subheadings or some other organization. You should also add more information to the third challenge, and you need to add a citation to your assertion "The answer to this problem is that children have the ability to learn some verbs without syntactic information." Additionally this sentence at the beginning is unnecessary "This article explores experimental evidence for this theory, and includes some arguments against this theory."

I think your article verges on essay a little too much. A lot of what you say in the logic section could just be provided in a quick paragraph with links.

Under the section underlying mechanisms number 2, you say "Using semantic structure children are able to decide..." I think you might have meant to say syntactic structure not semantic or I just misunderstood.

Overall I think the article is well written but you should in general be careful to make sure that you don't under explain or over explain. You also need to be careful in your evidence section to make sure that you connect each experiment to the hypothesis. Rebeccacm (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 02:42, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Review

Great draft! It seemed to me that your article was pretty much complete. I was not sure which parts you used from the existing article on syntactic bootstrapping. I think you have pretty much everything for the organization. The logic of the syntactic bootstrapping was clear to me. In terms of content you have a good article already.

I might be wrong, but I did not think that using questions in the explanation of the topic was necessary. Maybe you could say something like "The problem/issue is how children do..." for this place "How do children do this, though, when their surroundings do not give specific enough context for word learning?" Also, "How are children expected to make the correct associations between a new word and what it refers to when their environments are full of possible associations?" And so on.

I think this part "verbs are learned with a delay because the linguistic information that supports their acquisition is not available during the early stages of language acquisition." could be moved out of the introduction to a different subtopic.

You need citation for this "The premise of syntactic bootstrapping is that children - indeed, all humans - have an underlying mental grammar which processes utterances children hear and assigns meaning to terms based on which part of speech they belong to."

I do not think you need to say "This article explores experimental evidence for this theory, and includes some arguments against this theory." It is clear that you are going to provide evidence and criticism in the article.

Great evidence section. I think you provided enough information without going into the details of all the experiments. Shushunov (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 11:40, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Review

Organization: The overall organization of the article is clear. However, it seems a bit weird to add the part ‘Evidence against syntactic bootstrapping’ under the title ‘Evidence’. You may separate them into two different parts. Also, the ‘Evidence against syntactic bootstrapping’ seems to be similar to the ‘Challenges to the validity of syntactic bootstrapping’ part, as both of them talks about the disagreement on syntactic bootstrapping. You may consider rearranging the two parts together.
Logic: The article has sufficient information to allow readers to understand the topic and the logic is easy to follow.
Sentences: The sentences of the article are clear and the tone of the article is formal.
Completeness of the discussion: I think the overall discussion is complete.
Any content missing: Some of the year of publication of the references were missing. Ngkawing (talk) 23:05, 28 October 2016 (UTC)