Cognitive Psych Ch. 11 (Language) Book Questions
Boxing champion George Foreman recently described his family vacations with the statement, "At our ranch in Marshall, Texas, there are lots of ponds and I take the kids out and we fish. And then, of course, we grill them." That a reader understands "them" appropriately (George grills fish, not his kids!) is the result of a(n) inference.
Anaphoric
Consider the following sentences: "Captain Ahab wanted to kill the whale. He cursed at it." These two sentences taken together provide an example of a(n)..."
Anaphoric inference
Most of the coherence in text is created by...
Inference
Chaz is listening to his grandma reminisce about the first time she danced with his grandpa 60 years ago. When his grandma says, "It seemed like the song would play forever," Chaz understands that it is more likely his grandma was listening to a radio playing and not a CD. This understanding requires Chaz to use a(n)...
Instrument inference
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
When we look at a record of the physical energy produced by conversational speech in a person's native language, we see that the speech signal...
Is continuous.
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
One of Chomsky's most persuasive arguments for refuting Skinner's theory of language acquisition was his observation that children...
Produce sentences they have never heard.
In a study, participants listened to the following tape recording: Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room. Was participants heard the word "bugs," they completed a lexical decision task to a test stimulus flashed on a screen. To which of the following words would you expect participants to take the longest to respond to?
SKY
According to the situation model of text processing...
People create a mental representation of what the text is about in terms of people, objects, locations, and events
A psycholinguist conducts an experiment with a group of participants from a small village in Asia and another from a small village in South America. She asked the groups to describe the bands of color they saw in a rainbow and found they reported the same number of bands as their language possessed primary color words. These results...
Support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The crucial question in comparing syntax-first and interactionist approaches to parsing is when _____ is involved.
Semantics
The interactionist approach to parsing states that...
Semantics is activated as a sentence is being read
Brain imaging studies reveal that semantics and syntax are associated with which two lobes of the cerebral cortex?
The frontal and temporal lobes
Which of the following is NOT influenced by meaning?
Word frequency effect
Consider the sentence, "Because he always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him." The principle of late closure states that this sentence would first be parsed into which of the following phrases?
"Because he always jogs a mile"
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...
50% of the words spoken by their own voices
The given-new contract is a method for creating...
A comprehension between a speaker and a listener in a conversation
In the phonemic restoration effect, participants "fill in" the missing phoneme based on all of the following EXCEPT...
A mental "skimming" of the lexicon to find likely words
An experiment on the phonemic restoration effect would most likely include...
An extraneous cough
Which of the following is the best example of a garden path sentence?
Before the police stopped the Toyota disappeared into the night.
Imagine you are interpreting a pair of sentences such as "The sidewalk was covered with ice" and "Ramona fell down." The kind of inference we use to link these sentences together would most likely to be a(n) ______ inference.
Causal
Which property below is NOT one of the characteristics that makes human language unique?
Communication
In the lexical decision task, participants are asked to...
Decide whether a string of letters is a word or a non-word
Tanenhaus and coworkers' eye movement study presented participants with different pictures for interpreting the sentence, "Put the apple on the towel in the box." Their results showed the importance of _____ in how we understand sentences in real-life situations.
Environmental context
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 ______.
Fixation; pretty
In New Guinea, tribes that had been isolated for centuries were found that...
Had a large number of sophisticated language systems
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
Noam Chomsky proposed that...
Humans are genetically programmed to acquire and use language
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 Lil's class in his research. Dr. Nabuto is most likely studying...
Language acquisition
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?
Language has a structure that is governed by rules.
When two people engage in a conversation, if one person produces a specific grammatical construction in her speech and then the other person does the same, this phenomenon is referred to as...
Syntatic priming
The idea that the rules governing the grouping of words into a sentence is the primary determinant of the way a sentence is parsed is part of the ______ approach to parsing.
Syntax-first
When the front part of a sentence can be interpreted more than one way, but the end of the sentence clarifies which meaning is correct, we say that the sentence is an example of...
Temporary ambiguity
Tanenhaus and coworkers' eye movement study presented participants with different pictures for interpreting the sentence, "Put the apple on the towel in the box." Their results support...
The interactionist approach to parsing
Lexical ambiguity studies show that people access ambiguous words based on...
The meaning dominance of each definition of the word
Within the realm of conversational speech, knowledge refers to...
The previously understood information that we bring into the conversation
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.
"Kitchen tables" consists of ____ morphemes.
Three (Kitchen, Kitchen Table, Kitchen Tables)
The word "bad" has ___ phonemes.
Three (buh ahh duh)
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.
Trial 1; Word Frequency
Which set of stimuli would be the best selection for having people perform a lexical decision task?
Words "pizza, history" and non-words "pibble, girk"
B.F. Skinner, the modern champion of behaviorism, proposed that language is learned through...
Reinforcement
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?
The group with 10 years of English instruction
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...
Lexicon
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. Presentations at the conference are grouped 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...
Psycholinguistics
The _______ states that the nature of a culture's language can affect the way people think.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
According to the idea of ________, when we read a sentence like, "Carmelo grabbed his coat from his bedroom and his backpack from the living room, walked downstairs, and called his friend Gerry," we create a simulation of Carmelo's apartment and keep track of his location as he moves throughout the apartment.
Situation models
The word frequency effect refers to the fact that we respond more...
Slowly to low-frequency words than high-frequency words