User talk:Dynwrighter/sandbox/Poverty of the Poverty of the Stimulus/Poverty of the Poverty of the Poverty of the Stimulus

"In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the argument that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity. "

-This is the old intro from the other page, I took it out but I also took out the source, should I put it back in? Prosetta (talk) 19:33, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Hi guys! Some super-belated peer review; hope this is helpful. Apologies if this is on an outdated version of this page; if so, please ignore any critique I give on stuff that's already been fixed in later versions.

In the "Innateness and Linguistic Nativism" section, the sentence "One acquires a language not entirely through learning" is a) confusingly phrased, and b) seems like an opinion stated as a fact. Is what you're trying to say that language acquisition doesn't completely depend on generalized learning mechanisms/requires innate knowledge? If so, you may need to be more specific in your phrasing. I'd also get rid of the word "one" and simply replace it with "children." As for the "opinion stated as fact" thing: some people (including the empiricists you refer to in the intro) might actually say that you can learn language using only generalized mechanisms, and you don't have some special faculty/innate stuff that lets you do it. This section also often says things like "In his paper," or "In their article;" you could simply say who's putting forth the opinion, e.g. "Smith and Johnson assert blah blah blah...", and then use Wikipedia's built-in footnote citation at the end of the sentence. You also mention that Fiona Cowie protests against the argument that POS supports linguistic nativism, but don't explain why. To avoid unintentionally biasing your article toward a view that POS supports linguistic nativism, it may be worth briefly outlining some of Cowie's points against this view.

In the syntax section, the descriptions are mostly fine, but could use some clean-up for general sentence flow. Additionally, you should reformat so that the names are subheadings, and not bullet points.

In the phonology section, you should link to the Phonology article on the word "phonology," since you haven't elsewhere in the article. You might also want to link to this Wiki section about the Conditioned Head Turn Procedure, as it's something a naive audience is likely to be unfamiliar with.

In the "Criticisms" section, you state that "The Poverty of the Stimulus argument is not a single hypothesis, but a number of hypotheses all supporting the nativist notion that there is something inherent about the language learning process." This feels like something that may be worth stating at the end of your introduction, as not to unintentionally mislead readers into believing that POS is a single hypothesis, instead of an encompassment of multiple different hypotheses that support the same larger conclusion. You could then briefly re-assert this fact in the "Criticisms" section. Finally, in the "Other arguments" section, the last paragraph mentions a computer simulation, but there's no citation provided for this. There's also no citation for the idea that natural languages are composed of statistical cues; this is worth citing because a) it's not common knowledge, and b) someone could possibly argue against it.

Sorry for the length of this review; hope you all found it helpful!

Shkaplow (talk) 05:02, 15 December 2017 (UTC)