User talk:Mvanfoss

My first talk.

Psychology of Language[edit]

Welcome to the Psychology of Language Wikipedia course project. Below are links related to our course that may be helpful to you.

Let me know if you have any questions. --Kechambers (talk) 15:45, 23 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Possible Topics[edit]

Emotional Prosody

Article Assessment[edit]

Matt- I think you have a great start to your article. The first suggestion I would make is to rely on more sources in the development of your topic. You have two great sources, but integrating further research will be helpful. At some points, I think your writing may be slightly too advanced for the average reader (ex. "Portrayals of fear, joy, and anger are associated with a higher F0 (fundamental frequency of speech), while portrayls of sadness are associated with lower mean F0 in comparison to neutral speech.") The average reader may not understand what fundamental frequency of speech or neutral speech are, so think about describing these in more detail before you provide the results you are referring to. Further, in your opening sentence (Emotional Prosody is the tone of voice, not the linguistic or semantic information") you may consider writing with more prose, perhaps adding something at the end of the sentence that states these are the characteristics of speech, etc. I think it would also be valuable to add more examples to your writing to better illustrate these concepts for readers who may not be at all familiar with the topic. I am looking forward to reading your article as you continue to develop it! Kfinsand (talk) 13:55, 12 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Matt- ditto. Just kidding, but on the real, the topic is very interesting and you do a good job explaining what you are talking about. I can see you have other sections you are planning on adding to so once you start filling in the information there it might all come together a little more but over all its good just keep truckin' away with more information to further elaborate and add more references. The flow of sections works, so good job with that. Like Kierst said, maybe explain what fundamental frequency of speech and other terms that non-psych people might not know, just to make this article more user-friendly! :) Ahartlin (talk) 14:18, 12 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Matt- I am going to reiterate some previous comments, but hopefully also give you some new thoughts as well! I agree with Kierst that the first sentence should be reworded to say something like " The definition of Emotional Prosody is __________", or "Emotional Prosody is characterized as an individual's tone of voice in speech that _____________, which is different than linguistic and semantic information" Just make your intro as strong as possible to help your readers a. understand what they are about to read b. intrigue them!! The content of your article is really great,but I can't help but wonder if there is a better way to structure it to provide a framework for your readers (i.e- bullet points with bolded theories, etc) If you can't actually link the theories back to a page (which maybe you can??) then at least make them stand out so people can pick them out as main aspects of your article. As you probably know ( but I should say anyway) you are going to need a lot more supporting research for each section. If those are the main pieces that make up Emotional Prosody then I am guessing there are a lot of studies that discuss each piece? I could be wrong. The most confusing section of your article was the "Vocal Emotion from a Production Standpoint" section. The wording was hard to understand and I think you could expand on what you mean about "naive subjects" and "small numbers". Do you mean to say, "This research is not necessarily credible due to subject size and poor methods"?? That is kind of how I read that. Overall, you are headed in the right direction, so keep at it MATT! The overall framework will be great once it has more substance (and elaborated substance!) in it! Lkientzle (talk) 22:05, 17 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Your GA nomination of Emotional prosody[edit]

The article Emotional prosody you nominated as a good article has failed ; see Talk:Emotional prosody for reasons why the nomination failed. If or when these points have been taken care of, you may apply for a new nomination of the article. Jezhotwells (talk) 12:24, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Emotional prosody[edit]

Hi! I was having a look at your article on emotional prosody and you've been doing some very good work. :) However, there were a few issues that I figured I could raise, as I'm hoping you plan to further develop it and take it back through the good article process. So forgive me for jumping in here, but hopefully I can be of some help.

First, then, you've used lecture slides as one of the sources. They're a bit of a gray area - on the one hand they are self-published, so they are something that Wikipedia frowns on as sources. On the other hand, they were clearly written by an expert. Pesonally, I'd recommend staying away from lecture notes and slides. If nothing else, I think most professors don't take the same level of care with their slides as they do with published works, as they slides are intended to go with a spoken lecture where the would clairfy anything that isn't quite clear. On the plus side, the professor has sourced the material in the slides, so rather than using the slides themselves, I'd recommend tracking down the sources used to make them and relying on those. Plus your otehr sources are very good. :)

Second, you have tended to stick a bit too close to the original wording from the sources. This is a bit of a balancing act on Wikipedia. On the one hand you are asked to only report what is in reliable sources and not to incorporate any original reserch, while on the other Wikipedia inissts that you limit your use of direct quotations and avoid close paraphrasing. In this case, though, you've gone to far towards the close paraphrasing side of things. For example, in the article you wrote:

In the source-filter theory of speech production, speech sounds result from a combination of the energy created by the vibration of the vocal folds (vocal cords) and the filtering by the vocal tract above the larynx.

That is very close to the original:

In this framework, speech sounds result from the combination of source energy, produced by the vibration of the vocal folds (formerly referred to as the vocal cords) and the subsequent filtering of that energy by the vocal tract above the larynx.

(Some of the other text is closer to the sources, but this one is near enough to the border to be worth looking at). The problem is that thisnew wording is a derivitive work, but it is close enough to the source not to be regarded as having sufficient creative content so as to be a new work. Clearly you have made a decent attempt to reword the text, but the problem is that Wikipedia not only includes the content, but it re-licenses it under a creative commons license, and this risks creating a greater conflict between the copyright owner and Wikipedia. Hence Wikipedia's demands for paraphrasing and copyright compliance are very strict.

Anyway, I've trimmed it back a bit and I'll check the last couple of sources. There's no hassles with this - balancing Wikipedia's competing demands is tricky, so there is a tendency for people to fall into close paraphrasing at times, and, of course, it is complimentary that you would wish to reference someone's lecture, even if it falls outside of Wikipedia's sourcing requirements. :) If you need any help developing the article, please let me know - I'm always happy to assist when I can. - Bilby (talk) 06:32, 14 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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