Chapter 11 Language Quiz

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 property of the English language?

Languge has a structure that is governed by rules

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 demonstrates the property of language.

Hierarchical

Most of the coherence in text is created by

Interference

Syntax is

The rules for combining words into sentences.

A phoneme refers to

The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word

Which set of stimuli would be the best selection for having people perform a lexical decision task?

Words "pizza, history" and non-words "pebble, girk"

Noam Chomsky proposed that

humans are genetically programmed to acquire and use language.

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

invent a sign language themselves.

B.F. Skinner, the modern champion of behaviorism, proposed that language is learned through

reinforcement.

Coherence refers to the

representation of the text in a reader's mind, so that information in one part of the text is related to information in another part of the text.