User:Speechlearner67/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Accent perception

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I searched for articles within the Academic Disciplines category and within the Developmental Psychology subfield. I searched for articles related to language perception as it is an important part of communicative development. I specifically chose accent perception because in an increasingly globalized world, it is pertinent to study how different accents can affect language perception and judgments. I really enjoyed the article because it opened my eyes to how sociocultural factors affect cognitive processes.

Evaluate the article
Review by Ebony Goldman. This article is relatively short but comprehensive. My judgements are detailed below:

Lead Section:

- I think the introduction paragraph provides a good introduction to the scope of how accents affect behavior and cognition. The introduction focuses on accent judgements and how it involved how we characterize and categorize other speakers. I think the introduction could do a better job of outlining the specific topics that will be discussed in the article (theories & biases). Additionally, I think the introduction could be more concise as it introduces ideas that are not fully discussed in the article such as how cognitive processes are affected by accent perception (e.x how memory is affected by accent perception).

Content:

- The article does a good job of summarizing the content it does include, but I think there are some sections that are missing. I think the article would benefit from being divided into sections like "Theories of Accent Perception", which could include the section on "Social identity theory of accents," which is how speakers view other accents through the lens of social and cultural factors. However, other factors could be considered such as theories about acoustic perception and how we process sounds that differ from those that exist in our native language, as one example. I think there could be more details about other theories of accent differentiation. There is also a burgeoning literature on accent perception with neuroimaging methods, so I think this article could be updated to include some of those findings.

Tone:

- I find the article to be relatively neutral, while focused on social-cultural theories of accent perception. While accents are inextricably linked to ethnicity, race, and culture, the article could also address technical factors of accents, such as acoustic and prosodic perception.

Overall, I find the article to be well-written. The latest source cited in the article is from 2012, so I think that there could be more current sources as this is a constantly developing field. The article does a good job of summarizing social interaction theory as it relates to accents and I found it to be very interesting and informative. I think the article could be added to to be more detailed and thorough, so as to more widely characterize the literature on accent perception.