Chapter 9: Student Review Questions
1. Which of the following is the study of the articulatory features of language (such as how your lips and tongue are formed to produce a certain speech sound)?
a. inflection/prosody
b. phonology
c. phonetics
d. morphology
2. How might a researcher who supports the emergentview (i.e., someone who believes that language learning is pattern-based) explain the average person's intuition that "bnench" is not a valid word?
a. Humans are equipped with an innate ability to judge whether certain phonemes are allowable in a language.
b. People have induced that "bn" is a statistically uncommon consonant pair in English.
c. People have a sense that "bnench" sounds like a foreign word.
d. It takes too much time to go from a bilabial to an alveolar sound, so the /bn/ combination is not efficient.
3. Which of the following is the best piece of evidence against an innate language module in the human brain, especially for phoneme processing?
a. Non-human animals have been found to have categorical perception of phonemes, despite not producing a sophisticated language.
b. Children lose the ability to discriminate the phonemes of other languages at about 1 year of age.
c. Humans show similar levels of categorical perception for non-speech and speech sounds.
d. Both a & c
e. Both b & c
4. The English language uses approximately __ phonemes.
a. 26
b. 44
c. 56
d. 102
5. Which of the following combinations best describes the articulatory features of /f/?
a. bilabial, stop
b. bilabial, fricative
c. labiodental, stop
d. labiodental, fricative
6. At what age do children typically experience rapid vocabulary growth, or a vocabulary spurt (although there are individual differences)?
a. 6 months
b. 1 year
c. 18 months
d. 2.5 years
7. Overregularization refers to:
a. the tendency for children to generalize morphological rules about regular word forms to irregular forms.
b. the tendency for children to over-apply a word to similar items (as when they call all animals "doggy").
c. the tendency for children to only use a word for the first object, or in the initial context in which they first heard it (such as thinking that only their pet is a “fish”)
d. the linguistic finding that a higher proportion of high frequency words are irregular compared to low frequency words.
8. ______means the ability of children (or people in general) to understand that words are symbols that "point to" or mean objects, actions, or traits in the world.
a. Mutual Exclusivity
b. Selective Looking
c. Whole object principle
d. Reference
9. What is the best definition of generativity within the Chomskyan rule-based/computational perspective of language?
a. the tendency for children to make up words for sentences when they do not know the correct term for a noun or verb
b. the notion that sounds can evoke, or "generate" emotions in a listener
c. the ability to construct limitless new sentences using a limited vocabulary
d. the tendency for people to add in grammatical words (such as articles--the, a , an, and auxiliary verbs--is, will, etc.) when a new language is being developed
10. If a medical student is having trouble retrieving the word scoliosis (meaning curvature of the spine) when studying for an exam, research on tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon suggests that the best hint would be:
a. "scarf"
b. "curved"
c. "medical"
d. “backbone"