Language (Chapter 11- Test Questions)

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.

Syntax is the

rules for combining words into sentences.

Dictionaries commonly list the multiple definitions of a particular word in a numbered list, with the first definition as #1, the next definition as #2, and so on. Which concept does this reflect?

*Meaning dominance

Which of the following is NOT a factor in prosody?

*Semantics

In written English, which punctuation mark has the most parsing power?

Comma

Which term best reflects the process of reading and understanding sentences in a story?

Dynamic

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.

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 a nonverbal component of communication?

Theory of mind

From the perspective of the listener, as a person speaks, each sentence often is characterized by ________ until the sentence is completed.

ambiguity

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

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 be a(n) ____________________ inference.

causal

The given-new contract is a method for creating

comprehension between a speaker and a listener in a conversation

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 New Guinea, tribes that had been isolated for centuries were found that they

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

Most of the coherence in text is created by

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.

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

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

lexicon.

Within the realm of conversational speech, knowledge refers to the

previously understood information that we bring into the conversation.

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

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

reinforcement.

According to the concept of ________, when we read a sentence like, "Jorge 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 Jorge'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.

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

speech segmentation.

When two people engage in a conversation, if one person produces a specific grammatical construction in his or her speech and then the other person does the same, this phenomenon is referred to as

syntactic priming.

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

The crucial question in comparing garden path and constrain-based approaches to parsing is ____________________ is involved.

when semantics

The idea that the rules governing the grouping of words in a sentence is the primary determinant of the way a sentence is parsed is part of the ____________________ approach to parsing.

*garden path