User:Hm ross ymoh

This is a page in which I will practice Wikipedia editing techniques, and take notes on Wikipedia articles.

Being bold is important on Wikipedia

Notes

Notes on the biolinguistics page:

The intro states that the field includes linguists, biologists, neuroscientists etc., it would sounds better and make more sense if it said linguistics, biology, mathematics, etc.

"Eric Lenneberg’sBiological Foundations of Language remains a basic document of the field." - this sentence may not belong in the origins section. It does not say whether this is the first book on biolinguistics, or the advent of a new school of thought in biolinguistics, just that it is a basic document in the field. This statement is also uncited and it is opinion. Therefore it does not belong in the article unless one can find a source or sources corroborating the opinion.

"The biolinguistic perspective began to take shape in the mid-twentieth century, among the linguists influenced by the developments in biology and mathematics." - The comma is unnecessary in this sentence, as is the "the" between "among" and "linguists"

"Recent work in theoretical linguistics and cognitive studies at MIT construes human language as a highly non-redundant species-specific system." - This sentence needs citation. In fact, the entire "Developments" section requires citations for everything said in it.

"see for example the discussion Uriagereka 1997 and Carnie and Medeiros 2005)." - Neither of these texts are cited in and of themselves and it is unclear what the author means by "see for example the discussion". The only appearance of "Uriagereka" in the cited material (citation 4) is in that works citations.

"If this law applies to existing systems of cognition, both in humans and non-humans, then what allows our mind to create language? Could it be that a single cycle exists, a unique component of which gives rise to our ability to construct sentences, refer to ourselves and other persons, group objects and establish relations between them, and eventually understand each other? The answer to this question will be a landmark breakthrough, not only within linguistics but in our understanding of cognition in general." - This is not appropriate for a Wikipedia article. This information should be stated, not posed as a question. It should also be cited. All of it. It seems as though the answers to these questions are just suppositions made by the author.

"David Poeppel, a neuroscientist and linguist, has noted that if neuroscience and linguistics are done wrong, there is a risk of "inter-disciplinary cross-sterilization", arguing that there is a Granularity Mismatch Problem, as different levels of representations used in linguistics and neural science lead to vague metaphors linking brain structures to linguistic components." - run-on sentence. "if neuroscience and linguistics are done wrong" is not clear. Maybe the author could say neuroscience and linguistic studies, or experiments. It could also say "if improper information is concluded by neuroscientists and linguists". The Granularity Mismatch Problem should be defined.

As noted above, not every fact is referenced. The diction and grammar of this article is distracting. It could use quite a bit of cleaning up. The information is all relevant to biolinguistics, but some of the information, especially the critique section, uses very specific terms and could be simplified quite a bit so that the reader comes away with just a general understanding of the critiques of biolinguistics. The neutrality of the article is somewhat of a question. The cited works themselves don't seem biased, however, the "hypothesis" and "critiques" section have only one cited source, while the developments section have none. Using more sources and presenting different points of view in these sections would make the article appear more neutral. It follows then, that some viewpoints are underrepresented, seeing as there is only one view point in many of these sections. I have to imagine there are more viewpoints that one, even in a field as specialized as biolinguistics. The latest citation is from 2006. I imagine quite a bit of work in the field has been done since then, so I have to assume that even if the information is not out of date, there have been developments in the field since then that warrant inclusion in this page.