Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/University of Maryland, College Park/Child Language (Fall 2017)

Article Critique Question: Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added? Response: So I am basing this critique on the article's summary section at the very top of the article which is supposed to compact the findings, facts and assertions in the rest of the article succinctly. However, as noted in the training module, when that summary is too short, there is cause for suspicion (especially) for an article on subject matter as broad as the Poverty of the Stimulus hypothesis. As for the dating of the cited articles, they are, by research standards, rather old, 1980, 2001, 2004, 2003 and the one recent year, 2016, has a "clarification needed" tag on it and links to University College, London's Linguistics department page (which has nothing to do with his/her jargon-saturated statement). So, yes, I would say that the information is relatively out of date, although the 1980 citation can be forgiven as it is a Chomsky citation from one of his written works and the author mentions that work in the article itself. However, the other sources are out of date (if I were to use sources from the early 2000s in 2017 for a research paper, I would face consequences for such actions). As for what could be added, the statement "Nativists claim that humans are born with a specific representational adaptation for language that both funds and limits their competence to acquire specific types of natural languages over the course of their cognitive development and linguistic maturation" is without a citation and desperately needs one. And even along with citations, additionally, add a link to the Wikipedia article about Nativism. as not every visitor to this page my be familiar with linguistic nativist arguments or the overall argument manifestation of nativism in other fields. That would be quite helpful for such a article.

Question: Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted? Response: Of the five citations made in the summary section, three are journal articles (one of which has a PDF embedded in the citation), one is a book- Chomsky's Rules and representations and the last one is the problematic link to UCL's Linguistic page which in no overt way validates the claim that " Arguments in support of poverty of stimulus are not attempting to appeal to innate principles in exchange for learning appellates of universal grammar". As for whether there is a bias, I sense a nativist, Chomskiyan bias in lieu of retort that poverty of the stimulus is a "controversial statement"- the author doesn't at least state what the counter-current theories are ALTHOUGH the articles cited for that claim do go into cunterargumentative detail. However, for the most part, the author seems to have selected materials that buoy his/her perspective

ImJustHereSoIWontGetFined (talk) 16:25, 21 September 2017 (UTC) Montaser