cmsd 3120 practice exams
Roger Brown's study of the order of acquisition of 14 grammatical morphemes found that copulas were acquired earlier than auxiliaries and in each case the two uncontractible ones were acquired earlier than the two contractible ones. Here is the question. From this we know that the grammatical morpheme in ______ is acquired earlier than the others.
"He is." (response to "Who's sick?")
Research has found that sentences that describe events in a chronological order (that is, the temporal order of events matches the order of mentioning) are more difficult for children to process than sentences that describe events in a reverse order. Assume you know that the sentence "Before she drank the juice, she played in the park." is an example of reverse order. Which of the following sentences would be an example of chronological order?
"He poured the ketchup, before he ate the burger."
The regular plural [-s] morpheme, the regular third person singular [-s] morpheme, and the possessive morpheme are homophonous suffixes. Each of them has three allomorphs, as shown below for the plural morpheme. Here is the question. It has been found that for English learning children ______ was substantially more difficult than the other two allomorphs.
/ɨz/, which appears after sibilants (horses, /ˈhɔrsɨz/).
Deaf children also make babbling sounds. In addition, manual babbling has now been reported to occur in deaf children exposed to signed languages from birth. Table 1 below shows manual babbling and the gesture produced by three hearing children (H1, H2, H3) and two deaf children exposed to sign language (D1 and D2). The results in Table 1 show that in average the deaf children make about _______ times more manual "babbling" than the hearing children.
10
All of the following except _________________ indicate the impact of environmental factors on lexical development?
4 and 5 year old children with better phonological memory skills had more advanced vocabularies at both ages.
Usually between 18 and 24 months, when their vocabularies have reached about ______ words, most children experience a growth spurt in vocabulary. Interestingly, it's also when most children start to combine words to produce simple utterances.
50
The "fis" phenomenon refers to an oft-cited example of one child's refusal to accept "fis" as the label for his toy fish, even though "fis" was how the child produced the word (Berko & Brown, 1960). It is used as evidence that children's perceptual abilities are often in advance of their productive abilities. It suggests that children's immature productions do not necessarily imply that children incomplete mental representations of how the word is supposed to sound. Which of the following may also serve as an example for the 'fis' phenomenon?
A child named Alissa pronounced her name as though it were "yitya" for a long time. However, if someone else teasingly called her "yitya," she became quite incensed.
The figure below reports results from Mayberry & Lock (2003) on syntactic processing. The left part compares recall of complex sentences in ASL by a no-early-language group of deaf individuals who learnt ASL and English at about the same time in school versus a group with early spoken language (native speakers of English who learned ASL as a second language later in life). The right part compares grammaticality judgment of complex English sentences by a non-early-language group versus two groups with early language exposure (to either ASL or Urdu, Spanish, German, and French).
According to Mayberry & Lock (2003), these results suggest all of the following except _____.
German newborns were found to cry with a descending pitch; French newborns, on the other hand, with an ascending pitch, descending slightly only at the end. This observation suggests that ________.
All of the above: Before babies cry for the first time, when they are still in the womb, their sound is influenced by the language spoken by the mother. 2) Newborns' cry melody is shaped by their native language 3) Some learning of the properties of the native language has already taken place before birth
Treating different sounds differently and treating similar sounds as the same are two important aspects of perceiving speech sounds. An example of learning to treat different sounds differently would be _____________.
American infants need to learn to group the vowels in "apple," "up," "art," and "earth" into four categories
Hart and Risley recruited 42 families to participate in the study including 13 high-income families, 10 families of middle socio-economic status, 13 of low socio-economic status, and 6 families who were on welfare. Monthly hour-long observations of each family were conducted from the time the child was seven months until age three. The table below summarizes the major findings, which suggest all of the following EXCEPT ____. [Hint: The Matthew Effect]
As time passes, the disparities disappear entirely, and then emerge again in the opposite direction during college years.
All the following statements except _____ are true of sign language and sign language acquisition.
Children acquiring English and American Sign languages are learning two languages that differ both in modality and linguistic complexity
The Figure below summarize results from several studies on the perception of Hindi and/or Salish native sound contrasts that are not available in English by several groups of infants. The results in the figure below suggest that ________.
Children start to lose their ability to discriminate non-native sound contrasts around 10 month of age.
The book "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children" describes the remarkable findings of Betty Hart, Ph.D., and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D. Their longitudinal study of parent-child talk in families in Kansas was conducted over a decade. A team of researchers recorded one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families over a three year period, with children from seven months to 36 months of age. The 42 families included 13 high-income families, 10 families of middle socio-economic status, 13 of low socio-economic status, and 6 families who were on welfare. The figure below represents some of the basic findings from their study. According to the figure below, _______.
Children's vocabulary differs greatly across income groups
The typical 2-year-old speaker of English puts words together in short simple sentences that are missing many obligatory morphemes. Which of the following child utterances includes an omission of the contractible auxiliary verb 'be'?
Daddy drinking juice.
_____________ refers to children's knowledge about print, about books, and about the functions of literacy. For example, well before they can actually read, many children know how to hold a book and turn the pages, they know that words and stories are contained in the print on the page, they know that the print on signs and labels also contains information. Many studies have found that this collection of skills and knowledge about literacy predicts later reading and writing skills.
Emergent literacy
All of the following except ___________ provide evidence for the impact of maternal speech on vocabulary development.
Fernald et al. (2006) found that children who have shown more rapid vocabulary growth between 12 and 25 months are more rapid word processors at 25 months than children the same age with a slower rate of lexical growth.
Maneva and Genesee (2002) found that when French-English bilingual babies babble with their French fathers, their babbling shows phonological features of ________. Evidence like this suggests that bilingual children show early differentiation of their two languages.
French
Of the two groups of grammatical morphemes below, ___________ are generally easier for children to acquire than the other group.
Group B
Figure 5 below summarizes the perceptage of different types of complex sentence (relative to all complex sentences that 22-to-42 month old children produced). According to the figure, complex sentences such as ________________ were the first type of complex sentence to emerge and the most common type produced across the age period studied.
I saw heaven opened, and a white horse was standing there. [object complement clause]
Figure 4.2 below is an example of data on infant speech perception using the high amplitude sucking procedure. The data suggest that ___________.
Infant 1 is sensitive to the difference between the [a] and [i] sounds.
Which of the following examples contains an error of commission?
Lots of people camed. [in response to experimenter's question "Tell me about your party".]
Bates et al. (1975) studied spontaneous communicative behavior in children who were 2 months, 6 months, and 12 months old and followed each for approximately 6 months until their developmental courses overlapped. They found that from birth to around 10 months old, children have effects on their listeners, but the signals that have effects are not produced with the intention of communication to a listener. For example, a child who wants an object that is out of reach may try to get it and may make a fuss. In this case, the child's behavior has the effect of obtaining the object, but the child makes NO EFFORT TO COMMUNICATE with the mother. They call this stage of communicative development _______________.
Perlocutionary Phase
All of the following observations except _______ provide evidence to show that some learning of the properties of the native language is already in place by birth, presumably from prenatal or immediate postnatal exposure.
Petitto & Marentere (1991) found that deaf babies make ten times more manual "babbling" than their hearing controls.
Results from the following figure suggest that in addition to age of immigration, __________ also predicts how well immigrants learn English.
SES as measured by years/levels of formal eduction
In developmental psycholinguistics, bootstrapping refers to the question of how language acquisition "gets started." Syntactic bootstrapping suggests that children use syntactic knowledge they have developed to help learn what words mean. In other words, children could use syntax to infer meaning from newly encountered words. All of the following EXCEPT _________ may provide evidence for syntactic bootstrapping?
Santelmann and Jusczyk (1998) tested 18-month-old infants learning English on their ability to track the morphemes is and -ing across the root of the main verb using the Head-Turn-Preference Paradigm. They first compared infants' preference for grammatical passages with is and -ing as in The archeologist is digging for treasures to ungrammatical passages with can and -ing, as in *The archeologist can digging for treasures. They found that 18-month-olds looked longer toward the source of sound for the natural over the unnatural passages. This suggests that infants have noted and can track the relationship between the two dependent morphemes is and -ing across the root of the verb.
_____________ occurs when the child has exposure to the first language (L1) at birth and then begins to have exposure to the second language (L2) later in childhood or adulthood.
Sequential bilingualism
The two figures below summarize results from two studies using the dimensional change card sorting game (DCSS) to compare the cognitive flexibility of bilingual children and monolingual children. While we see difference between the bilingual children and monolingual children on the left figure, no difference is found in the right figure. Here is the question. The figure on the left shows difference between bilingual and monolingual children's performance on __________. (Hint: There are variations of the DCSS, one involving perceptual stimuli and the other involving conceptual stiumuli)
Shape-color game
There are two groups of grammatical morphemes below. Group-A morphemes are considered to be ____________.
Tense marking morphemes
Young infants can distinguish non-native sound contrasts, in both vowels and consonants. However, adults can't distinguish non-native sound contrasts without training. Figure 4.2. reports the performance of Hindi adults (left), 6-8 month old English infants (middle), English-speaking adults (right) on the perception of two pairs of Hindi sound contrasts that are not available in English. It suggests all of the following EXCEPT _______.
The English 6-8 month old infants and adults ignore these non-native sound contrasts.
In a study by Mehler and colleagues (1988), babies born to French-speaking mothers heard tapes of French and Russian speech, and the babies' sucking rate—as an indicator of their levels of arousal—was measured as they listened to the tapes. These researchers found that __________________, and they interpreted these findings as evidence that newborns can distinguish utterances in their native language from utterances in another language.
The French-speaking babies showed more arousal when they heard French than when they heard Russian.
_____ may count as evidence for critical period for language acquisition.
The age at which one acquires a second language correlates negatively with one's ultimate level of proficiency in that language, particularly with respect to syntax and phonology.
Phonological development of an English speaking child includes all of the following except ___________.
The child comes to know that "John kissed Mary" and "Mary kissed John" are both fine sentences, albeit with different meanings.
An important component of language acquisition is to establish and use the native phoneme repertoire. This may include all of the following EXCEPT __________.
The typical 2-year-old speaker of English puts words together in short simple sentences that are missing many obligatory morphemes.
All the following observations EXCEPT ____________________ show the effect of bilingual exposure on the development of phoneme perception.
Two month old infants who are exposed to English only can distinguish English from Dutch or English from Chinese, but they cannot distinguish Dutch from Chinese.
It's commonly observed that a child might say something like "I breaked the glass" or "I falled down." Adults don't say things like 'breaked' or 'falled', but children do. So children often say things they couldn't have imitated. Grammatical errors like these offer insights into how children use patterns in language development. Grammatical errors like 'breaked the glass' suggest that the child is doing something creative: the child is in fact working out the structure of the grammar . Even more interesting is the observation that an extended period of correct performance precedes children's first extension of the regular grammatical patterns to irregular words. Thus, there seems to be _________ development in the acquisition of such grammatical morphemes.
U-shaped
A great deal of evidence supports the view that joint attention, which is defined as ______________, supports language development. Infants who are more precocious at developing joint attention skills are also more advanced in later measures of language development. In addition, early word learning may require parents' and children's coordinated attention to each other and to a third object or event.
a social-communicative act in which a person jointly attends to both an object and another person
Roger Brown (1973) proposed a list of eight semantic relationships that he claimed accounted for the majority of the meanings children express in their two-word utterances, even children acquiring different languages. A child who said 'kick ball' was expressing the semantic relation of ______.
action + object
Children learning sign languages such as ASL are learning ____.
all of the above: 1) a generative system that can produce an infinite number of utterances 2) a system that exhibits all of the kinds of linguistic properties of spoken languages like English 3) the linguistic properties that are independent of the language spoken in the community (e.g., ASL and British Sign Language are completely different and mutually unintelligible)
In many cultures, adults use a particular way of speaking with babies (Fernald et al., 1989; Grieser & Kuhl, 1988). This style of speech is called—motherese, or infant-directed speech or child-directed speech. Infant-directed speech ________________.
all of the above: is produced with a higher-pitched voice, a wider range of pitches, longer pauses, a slower tempo, and shorter phrases than adult-directed speech. might support language acquisition by providing particularly clean examples of the sounds to be learned. is preferred over adult-directed speech for infants.
Longitudinal studies have found that differences among children in phonological awareness before they learn to read predicts their later reading skill—through at least the fourth grade. All of the following EXCEPT ____________ are examples of tasks that measure phonological awareness.
ask children to tell the names of the letters of the alphabet and the sound associated with each letter
Regarding the role of biology in language development, Dr. Pinker said the following: "Overall, the genetic double _________ is striking.... The genes of one group of children [SLI] impair their grammar while sparing their intelligence; the genes of another group of children [WS] impair their intelligence while sparing their grammar (Pinker, 1999, pg. 262)."
association
Sometime around 6 to 9 months of age, the quality of infants' vocalizations changes, and the infants start to engage in ________ which is a sound pattern consisting of consonants and vowels (that is, take the forms of true syllables).
babbling
Maye and colleagues (2002) created an 8-step continuum of speech stimuli from [da] to [ta] as below and tested two groups of 6-8 month old infants using this set of 8 different "da/ta" type syllables. Results show that the _____ of infants who heard more instances of stimuli 2 and 7 (shown by the dotted line below) performed differently from the ______ of infants who heard more instances of stimuli 4 and 5 (shown by the solid line). Maye and colleagues (2002) interpreted these results as providing evidence for the hypothesis that infants are sensitive to the frequency distribution of speech sounds in the input.
bimodal group; monomodal group
The figure below suggests that children appear to understand far more than they are able or willing to say, and this is the case for __________________________.
both english and italian
Results below from a study by Tardif present some ______________ the idea that "noun bias" in children's early vocabularies is universal.
challenge to
English speaking 3 year olds have often been heard to say things like "Stop giggling me', "My teacher holded the baby rabbit", "My nose is crying", "I hate you, mama", and "I am barefoot all over". Utterances like these suggest that ___________.
children are not simply imitating what they hear from their parents
Jill de Villiers and Thomas Roeper (1995) presented 3- to 6-year-old children with stories like below, and asked them two separate questions: (1) "When did the boy say he fell?" or (2) "When did the boy say how he fell?". They found that that even 3-year-olds knew that there were two possible answers of the first question and that the word "how" in the second question made only one answer possible. Here is the question. Children's performance in response to questions like these makes it clear that they know subtle aspects of ________________ at a very young age.
complex syntax
The dimensional-change card-sort task (DCCS) that is commonly used to examine the effect of bilingualism on executive functioning involves two conditions. In the pre-switch condition, participants sort cards either by the color (red, blue) or shape (circle, square) of diagrams on the cards. In the post-switch condition, they are instructed to switch to the other dimension. The mean number correct in the post-switch condition indicates whether participants are successful in switching to the second dimension following the rule change. Kova´cs and Mehler (2009) found that 7-month-old infants raised in bilingual households outperformed on the dimensional-change card-sort task (DCCS) than their peers raised in monolingual households. This observation is _________ with the results in the figure below of two studies (Bialystok, 1999; Bialystok & Martin, 2004) involving the performances of 4- and 5-year-old children on DCCS.
consistent
The following child words produced all involve the phonological process of __________. blanket [baki]; clown [kawn]; flower [f?:wa]
consonant cluster reduction
The following figure is very similar to a figure we viewed in class when talking about the effect of age of acquisition. In this figure, the vertical axis represents English ability, while the horizontal axis represents age of arrival in USA which is also the age of acquiring English as a second language. The figure shows a decline in language ability of non-native speakers of English as a function of their age upon arrival in the United States. As the figure shows, those non-English speaking immigrants who arrive in the US after age 7 attain significantly worse eventual English skills than those who arrived at an earlier age or those who were born in the United States (the pink line). The results here are consistent with one version of the ______________ hypothesis which holds that language acquisition displays a normal course and leads to full proficiency in the language only when it begins early in life.
critical period
Upon hearing a novel word, language learners must identify its correct meaning from a diverse set of situationally relevant options. Such referential ambiguity could be reduced through repetitive exposure to the novel word across diverging learning situations. This type of learning the meaning of words across multiple exposures, despite exposure-by-exposure uncertainty as to the word's true meaning, is referred to as _______________.
cross-situational learning
Evidence for lexical differentiation in bilingual children typically includes ______________.
degree of overlap between the vocabularies of the child's two languages
When children try to say a word containing sounds that they can't yet pronounce, they often either drop the tough sound (deletion) or replace it by an easier one (substitution). This can happen a lot, and in fact more than 90% of the early words produced by some children show the effects of deletion and/or substitution. The common phonological process in the following child words produced by children is __________.
deletion of unstressed syllable
Anglin (1993) asked children in first, third, and fifth grade (6-11 years of age; n = 96) to explain the meanings of morphologically complex words (e.g., government, workable) in a word definition task. During this process, older children often referred to the meanings of constituent morphemes. For example, when asked to explain the word semi-liquid, one fifth-grade student responded, "like liquid is a wet substance, like, but semi- could mean half, like half liquid or something" ( p. 99). Younger children were less inclined to analyze words in this way. Here is the question. The study of Anglin (1993) is a study of the development of ______ morphology .
derivational
It has been claimed that children simultaneously acquiring two languages go through an initial stage when they are unable to differentiate between their two languages. Such claims have been based on the observation that at times virtually all bilingual children mix elements (e.g. lexical, morphological) from their two languages in the same utterance. Here is the question. The following figure represents a stage of bilingual development where the child ________.
develops two lexical systems, but still relieson one syntax for both languages
Petitto et al.(2001) found that bimodal 2 year old bilinguals keep grammars separate in real time. Specifically, they found that when children who speak French and sign in Quenbec Sign Language simultaneously speak and sign, they speak and sign with ____________.
distinct word orders
MLU (mean length of utterance) is a valuable measure of children's syntactic development. This descriptive measure of early speech counts the number of morphemes in each utterance that a child produces during a recording session, sums over the utterances, and then ____________ as shown below.
divides the total number of morphemes by the total number of utterances.
Pearson et al. (1993) observed that vocabulary production of the English dominant bilingual children (8 to 30 months of age) is comparable to that of the monolingual children, in terms of ____________ measures, as the figure below shows.
double language (i.e., both English and Spanish)
The figure below summarizes results of a study comparing sign language skills of four groups of ASL learners. The first three groups learned ASL as L1 at different ages, while the fourth group included native speakers of English who learned ASL as L2. The results suggest evidence for effects of all of the following except ______.
early sign language experience on later spoken language learning
Like every other aspect of human development, language development is characterized by individual differences. One aspect of this variation can be in rate of language development. According to Figure 1, which of the following children is a more rapid developer than the others as far as MLU is concerned?
eve
Using an elicited imitation task, Boyle and Gerken (1997) found that lexical familiarity influenced young children's tendency to omit grammatical function morphemes. For example, the likelihood for children to omit the definite article 'the' differed depending on whether the noun that follows 'the' is a familiar word, unfamiliar word, or a nonsense word (e.g., He's breaking the stick/twig/kad). The table below represents results showing the average percentage of children's responses without the omission of the preceding determiner. Results show that 2-year-olds were least likely to omit (or more likely to preserve) the preceding determiner when the noun was _____________. This result was used to support the contention that children omit grammatical morphemes due to processing difficulties.
familiar
Children can learn aspects of the meaning of a new word on the basis of only a few incidental exposures and can retain this knowledge for a long period. This process is often dubbed '___________'.
fast mapping
Markson and Bloom (1997) taught three- and four-year-old children and adults a novel name ("Let's use the koba to measure which is longer. We can put the koba away now.") and a description containing a novel fact about an object ("We can use the thing my uncle gave me to measure which is longer. We can put the thing my uncle gave me away now."). Participants were tested on their retention immediately, after a 1-week delay or after a 1-month delay. The figure below show the proportion of three- and four-year-old children (open bars) and adults (filled bars) who, after a one-month delay, recalled the object to which the novel word referred (Koba), and the object that had the property of being given to the experimenter by her uncle (Uncle). There was no difference in performance between children and adults in both the 'Koba' and 'Uncle' condition. This finding suggests that ______________.
fast mapping is not limited to word learning.
The high-amplitude sucking (HAS) technique is one of the most widely used procedures to study infant speech perception. It makes use of three characteristics of babies: (1) Babies like to hear sounds, (2) babies lose interest in a sound when it is presented repeatedly, and (3) babies who have lost interest in a previously repeated sound will become interested if a new sound is presented. Thus, to find out whether babies can tell the difference between two sounds, researchers present one sound until the baby loses interest, and then they present another. If the baby shows renewed interest, the researchers infer that the baby can tell that a new sound has been presented. Here is the question. During an experiment using the HAS technique, the apparent loss of interest in a sound (as indicated by the decline of the baby's rate of sucking) is referred to as ______________.
habituation
This figure below shows the effects of age on discrimination of the English /r--l/ phonetic contrast by American and Japanese infants at 6-8 and 10-12 months of age. While the American infants at 10-12 months continued to improve their ability to discriminate the two sounds, the 10-12 month old Japanese infants were hardly able to discriminate the /r--l/ contrast. Which of the following is the most plausible explanation for these observations?
in English, /r/ and /l/ occur very frequently forming a bimodal distribution, but in Japanese, the most frequent sound of this type is Japanese /r/ which is related to but distinct from both the English variants forming a unimodal distribution.
Although English has both an aspirated /p/ sound as in 'speak' and an unaspirated /p/ sound as in 'peak', the form p takes depends on the sound that precedes it, and English speakers automatically produce the correct form. There is never a case in which two words differ only in the use of aspirated /p/ or unaspirated /p/. Because aspiration is never the basis for a contrast between two words in English, aspiration ___________ a distinctive feature in English and it does not carry meaning.
is not
Young children may use single-word utterances to perform different communicative functions. For example, a child was observed to utter 'eyes' while touching the doll's eyes. In this case, the child was most likely trying to perform the communicative function of _____________.
labeling
In his letter to the saints in Corinth, Paul says that "Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker is a foreigner to me." Paul's statement is consistent with the observation that ____________.
language has both a form and a meaning aspect.
One cognitive consequence of bilingualism is the age of the onset of dementia and alchemizes disease. Bialystok et al. (2007), for example, shows that bilingual patients show first symptoms of dementia on average 4 years _______ than monolingual patients.
later
Sénéchal and LeFevre (2001) carried out an experiment to tease out the role of socializing the literacy behaviors through exposing children to books and the role of directly teaching children reading skills to support later literacy acquisition. They separately measured how much direct teaching of reading and writing parents did and also how much exposure to books they provided their preschool children. These two behaviors were sufficiently independent that the children could be classified into four groups: (1) high teaching and high reading, (2) high teaching but low reading, (3) low teaching and high reading, and (4) low teaching and low reading. The development of these children in terms of emergent literacy at the beginning of grade 1, reading skill at the end of grade 1, and reading skill at the end of grade 3 is depicted in Figure 9.8. The results suggest that ___________________.
literacy is a set of cultural practices that is transmitted from one generation to the next
Infants who do not tune their perceptual system to their native language phonemes in a timely manner ______.
may show later difficulties with other aspects of language development.
The 'Switch' task, a laboratory task of word learning, consists of two phases. During the habituation phase, infants are habituated to repeated pairings of words and objects. During the test infants are shown one trial with a correct pairing (i.e., SAME) and one trial with incorrect paring (i.e., SWITCH). Infants show that they have learned the two pairings by looking longer at the switch trials than at the same trials. Here is the question. The figure below reports the results across two studies. The 14 month old passed the switch task in one study, but failed in the other. The crucial difference between the switch tasks in the two studies that may account for the different results is that one involves ___ while the other involves ____.
non-minimal pair words; minimal pair words
It is also possible to have several phonological processes affecting speech production at any one time. All of the following except _______ involve two or more co-occurring phonological processes.
octopus being said as ocpus.
For unimodal verbal bilinguals such as English-Spanish bilinguals, potential conflict from the two language systems is always present. By contrast, such a conflict is less intrusive for speech-sign bilinguals who can resolve the conflict by simply producing both languages simultaneously. In a study comparing monolinguals, (unimodal) verbal bilinguals, and bimodal speech-sign bilinguals, advantages in executive control on a nonverbal executive functioning task were found _________ (Emmorey, Luk,Pyers, & Bialystok, 2008).
only for the verbal bilinguals
Freitas (1997) in her one-year longitudinal study of six Portuguese children found these children all acquired the /s/-obstruent clusters first even though Portuguese has both /s/-obstruent clusters (as in 'stop') and obstruent-sonorant clusters (as in 'black"). This is an example of ______________, which involves learning to combine the sounds in a language-specific way.
phonotactic learning
In child language research, bootstrapping refers to the question of how language acquisition "gets started." The hypothesis that children use the function of language, e.g., their desire to influence others, to break into the formal system of language, is called _______.
pragmatic bootstrapping
The non-word repetition task (for example the one used in the study of Fragile X syndrome children) is an example of ________________.
production paradigm
The following picture best illustrate an essential property of language called ___________, which is a process that can takes its own output as the next input, a loop that can be extended indefinitely to create sequences or structures of unbounded length or complexity. Simply put, it's when an expression of some type contains another expression of that same type.
recursion
Consider the turn taking below between the mother (MOT) and the child (CHI). While the child's responses seem to suggest that toddlers respond to speech directed at them, especially questions, this child's responses also show that ________________. *MOT:what colour is that? (points at a blue hat) *CHI: blue *MOT:that's right! That's a blue hat *MOT: now, what colour are those? (points at red shoes) *CHI: blue
responding doesn't necessary means understanding
Dichotic listening tasks have been used to test the hemispheric asymmetry of language processing. In a dichotic listening task, two different stimuli are presented simultaneously, one to each ear, and the listener is asked to report what was presented. In the early 60s, Doreen Kimura observed that participants were more likely to report linguistic stimuli presented to the participants' ________. She attributed the ________ advantage "to the localization of speech and language processing in the so-called dominant left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex."
right ear
Children acquire the vocabulary of natural languages at remarkable speed in spite of some potential challenges. Here is the question. The following examples of children's speech errors suggest that the potential challenge for children to ___________.
segment continuous stream of speech into individual words
The following table shows that composition of different word types in the early vocabulary of English-speaking children. The results from the table show that __________________.
some children have more referential vocabularies than other children.
Visual information plays an important role in phonological development. Mills (1987) compared three blind infants (aged 1;0 - 2;1 years) to three typically developing age-matched infant learning German in their production of sounds with visible articulations (e.g., /b/) versus the production of sounds without visible articulations (e.g., /k/). Two important results were reported. First, sighted children learned those ______________ more quickly than ___________. Second, blind children learn sounds that have visible articulation more slowly than sighted children and produced a different pattern of speech errors.
sounds that have visible articulation; sounds that do not have visible articulation
Even though children often find thematic relations between objects (e.g., cats eat mice; birds build nests) particularly salient and interesting, they reject thematic relations as a first hypothesis about what a novel word might refer to. Instead, they constrain the possible meanings of words to refer to objects of like kind. For example, when presented with two objects, such as a dog and cat, and a third object that was thematically related such as dog food, children would often select a dog and dog food as being the same kind of thing. If, however, the dog was called by an unfamiliar label such as "dax" and children were told to find another dax, they now were more likely to select the cat. This illustrates the basic phenomenon: When children believe they are learning a new word, they focus on ___________ relations.
taxonomic
Children's early multiword sentences frequently deviate from the adult model. The following examples are best categorized as _______.
telegraphic speech
Accumulating evidence supports the claim for a lifelong positive effect of bilingualism on executive-control processes. In a study by Bialystok & Shapero (2005), monolingual and bilingual 6-year-old children were comparable in locating a hidden shape in a complex drawing in the Children's Embedded Figures Task, but bilinguals were more able to change their interpretation of an ambiguous figure (e.g., the duck-rabbit) to acknowledge the other image in the Ambiguous Figures Task. Both tasks require perceptual analysis, but only the ________ requires inhibiting the original meaning of the stimulus.
the Ambiguous Figures Task
Monolingual newborns can discriminate languages from different rhythmical classes (e.g., English versus French), even when they haven't previously heard the two languages. This provides evidence that _________.
the ability to discriminate languages from different rhythmical classes is independent of prenatal listening experience.
______________ holds that the left hemisphere is specialized for processing language from birth, whereas _______________ holds that left hemisphere is not specialized for language at birth, but language shifts there during maturation.
the invariance hypothesis; the equipotentiality hypothesis
One way to assess children's acquisition of grammatical morphemes is to use pictures like the following two as stimuli for data elicitation. These two pictures can be used to elicit children's production of _______________.
the plural morpheme and the possessive morpheme
The babbling drift hypothesis emphasizes _______________.
the potential effect of the language that babies are exposed to
Child language researchers have proposed several principles that guide children to map novel labels (i.e. labels with no known referent) to novel objects (i.e. objects for which the child does not know a name). This question is about your understanding of those principles, and your task is to select one of the four principles to fill in the blanks. Imagine that a child is presented with two toys. One is a toy car, and the child already knows the name "car". The other has never been seen before. If the experimenter asks the child to "Hand me the car", children as young as 16 months comply (Mervis & Bertrand, 1994). But, if the experimenter instead asks, "Hand me the dax", how is the child to decide on the correct referent? Utilizing __________, the child may be driven to preferably map the novel label "dax" to the novel toy because the car already has a known label (i.e. "car") and, according to ________, it cannot receive another.
the principle of mutual exclusivity
As we mentioned in class, children were found to have greater difficulty with the item on the left than on the right, even though both items were intended to assess the production of __________.
the regular plural morpheme
Infants are called "universal listeners" because _______.
they can discriminate among a large - perhaps universal - set of phones, and in particular they are capable of discriminating sound contrasts that are not part of their native language.
Bilingual speakers tend to have __________ proficiency in their two languages.
unbalances
Weikum and colleagues (2007) used a habituation paradigm to compare the ability to ___________ in English monolingual and French-English bilingual infants. They showed infants images of several individuals silently speaking either French or English. Once infants' interest in the videos began to wane, they tested infants by showing them either new sentences from the same language as before, or by showing them sentences from the other language. At 4 and 6 months, both monolingual and bilingual infants showed increased interest when sentences from a new language were presented, suggesting that they had discriminated the languages visually. By the age of 8 months, only bilingual (French-English) infants succeed at this task just from viewing silently presented articulations.
use visual cues to discriminate languages
In a TED talk "The birth of a word", Dr. Deb Roy mentioned that soon after his son's first birthday, his son would say "gaga" to mean water. And over the course of the next half-year, he slowly learned to approximate the proper adult form, "water." During the developmental trajectory from 'gaga' to 'water', the child was observed to produce "Gagagagagaga Gaga gaga gaga guga guga guga wada gaga gaga guga gaga wader guga guga water water water water water water water water water". HERE IS THE QUESTION. The child's production of 'guga' is a form of ________________________.
variegated babbling
Jusczyk, Friederici, Wessels, Svenkerud, and Jusczyk (1993) presented American and Dutch 6- and 9-month-old babies with American and Dutch words. At 9 months, but not at 6 months, the American infants listened longer to the American words, and the Dutch infants listened longer to the Dutch words. When only the prosodic contours of the words were presented, there were no preferences, because English and Dutch have _______________________. This result suggests that, by 9 months, infants have learned something about the kind of sound patterns that characterize their language.
very similar prosodic characteristics
