Language consists of smaller components, like words, that can be combined to form larger ones, like phrases, to create sentences, which themselves can be components of
a larger story. This property is known as
a. hierarchical structure.
b. relational organization.
c. parallel organization.
d. propositional representation.
a. hierarchical structure.
Which property below is NOT one of the characteristics that makes human language
unique?
C. Communication
Yoda, a central character of the Star Wars
movies created by George Lucas, has a distinctive way of speaking. His statement, “Afraid you will be,” violates which English language property?
A. Rules
Evidence that language is a social process that must be learned comes from the fact that when deaf children find themselves in an environment where there are no people
who speak or use sign language, they are unable to develop any formal language
skills.
a. True
b. False
b. False
In New Guinea, tribes that had been isolated for centuries were found that
D. had a large number of sophisticated language systems.
B.F. Skinner, the modern champion of behaviorism, proposed that language is learned through
C. reinforcement.
Noam Chomsky proposed that
C. humans are genetically programmed to acquire and use language.
One of Chomsky's most persuasive arguments for refuting Skinner's theory of language acquisition was his observation that children
A. produce sentences they have never heard.
Ty has finished work on his doctoral dissertation. He studied how most adults
understand words, specifically the priming effects of categorically related words and submitted a proposal to be included in a psychological conference to present his work to his peers. Presentation at the conference is segregated based on the particular topic in psychology under consideration. It is most
likely that Ty’s work will be presented in a conference session on
A. psycholinguistics.
Lilo can’t wait for school to start. This year is the first time she gets to take a foreign language class, and she is taking Japanese. Dr. Nabuto is a professor interested in studying how people learn additional languages later in life, and he is including Lilo’s class in his research. Dr. Nabuto is most likely studying
C. language acquisition.
Ron is an avid reader. He has a large vocabulary because every time he comes across a word he doesn’t know, he looks it up in the dictionary. Ron encounters “wanderlust” in a novel, reaches for the dictionary, and finds out this word
means “desire to travel.” The process of looking up unfamiliar words increases Ron’s
C. lexicon.
A phoneme refers to
A. the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word.
The word "bad" has ____ phoneme(s).
D. three
"Kitchen tables" consists of ____ morphemes.
A. three
An experiment on the phonemic restoration effect would most likely include
D. an extraneous cough.
In the phonemic restoration effect, participants "fill in" the missing phoneme based on all of the following EXCEPT
D. a mental "skimming" of the lexicon to find likely words.
You are conducting a study on how fluency influences the phonemic restoration effect. You study two groups of non-native English speakers, one with a year of English classes and the other with 10 years. All of your stimuli are in English. Who would you expect to show the greatest phonemic restoration effect?
A. The group with 10 years of English instruction
When we look at a record of the physical
energy produced by conversational speech, we see that the speech signal
D. is continuous.
Pollack and Pickett's experiment on understanding speech found that when participants were presented with individual words taken out of conversations (single words presented alone with no context), they could identify
A. 50% of the words spoken by their own voices.
The word frequency effect refers to the fact that we respond more
B. slowly to low-frequency words than high-frequency words.
Which set of stimuli would be the best selection for having people perform a lexical
decision task?
B. Words “pizza, history” and non-words “pibble, girk”
In the lexical decision task, participants are asked to
A. decide whether a string of letters is a word or a non-word.
A researcher had participants read each of
the sentences below and measured the time it took to read each sentence.
Trial 1: The lamb ran past the cottage into the pasture.
Trial 2: The dog ran past the house into the yard.
The participants’ response times were longer for _____ because of the _____ effect.
A. trial 1; word frequency
In an eye movement study, Rayner and coworkers had participants read sentences
that contained either a high- or low-frequency target word. For example, the
sentence “Sam wore the horrid coat though his ____ girlfriend complained,” contained either the target word “pretty” or “demure.” Results showed the participants’ _____ was shorter for the target word _____.
A. fixation; pretty
Within the realm of conversational speech,
context refers to
