Psych 151 Midterm Memorization
When analyzing Experiment 3's data, Hudson Kam and Newport reported no significant difference in the rate with which adults and children produced the main determiner form. Please explain what aspect of the children's data led the authors to conclude that "children [...] almost always regularize inconsistent forms, whereas adult learners [...] only regularize the most complex inconsistencies".
Almost all the children regularized some form, even if it was not the main determiner form. Children consistently created rules to regularize the pattern in the language, even if their created rules did not match the actual pattern in the language (some children regularized an ND, and some children came up with complex rules to use one determiner in transitive sentences and another determiner in intransitive sentences). The important takeaway, however, is that children generally appeared to have a greater tendency to come up with SOME universal theory of how the determiner ought to work even if that theory did not match the rates of appearance in the language. Even though Experiment 3 did not show a significant difference, the previous two experiments helped to build this conclusion. Experiment one tested up to 16 noise determiners (ND) to see when adults regularized the main determiner (which occurred at 60% of the time regardless of the number of NDs); the results from this experiment illustrated that adults became systematic when there were a high number of scattered inconsistencies (8 or 16). Experiment 2 was crucial to ensure that it wasn't just that the quantity of 16 ND that produced regularization; by using the 16 ND consistently they found that adults reproduced what was in their environment and did NOT regularize. Experiment three was the one that they could draw conclusions from because of the baseline done on the previous two experiments. Children in all groups became systemic users of determiners instilling either the experimental rules or their own derivation of the rules, but adults did not become systemic users and instead replicated what they heard in their environment. This finding could be explained by the youth being in the critical period and thus more readily applying their universal grammar to their natural input to create a mental grammar.
Kuhl et al. (2005) showed that infants' ability to perceive native contrasts predicts the extent to which the infants will have developed language skills later in age. They then propose that "speech perception skills could assist infants' detection of phonotactic patterns, patterns that describe combinations of phonemes that are legal in the child's native language and that characterize words in that language" (page 253). Please explain exactly why the speech-perception skills considered by Kuhl et al. may help young children discover how phonological units (phonemes) can be combined in their native language.
Based on Kuhl et al., speech perception is associated (no causation) with later language because of four specific links: phonotactic pattern learning (words), statistical learning of distributional cues(phonetic learning), statistical learning of adjacent dependencies (words), and sound/object correspondence (words). Specifically phonotactic patterns, such as the rule that /h/ is always an onset and /ŋ/ is always a coda come from infants being able to detect differences in the pattern of their language. Additionally, adults listening to a different language do not hear the separation between words, but through speech perception skills youth can start to hear the boundaries (transitional probabilities between segments and syllables) allowing them to use their universal grammar and apply it to the environment to create mental grammar based on the patterns. Finally using the sound patterns and phonemes infants start to associate sound with objects allowing them to learn language! So i don't get this yet... can we clean up this word vomit? I think we need to explain the four things that I listed on top.
In the Quam & Swingley study discussed in class, 2-years old English-learning children who were exposed to the word "deebo" as the label for a novel object looked less at that object (and more at another novel object that had not been named before) when asked to find the "dahbo" than when asked to find the "deebo". By contrast, a change in the pitch contour produced on the word "deebo", when asked to find the "deebo", had no comparable impact on children's looking behavior. Please speculate what the authors would predict observing if the study was conducted on a group of Cantonese-learning 2-year olds. [Note: Cantonese Chinese is a tone language.]
Cantonese-learning children learn that tones are a distinctive feature of syllables. They learn to note the difference between pitch contours in a way that English-learning children do not. This does not preclude them from ALSO noting the difference between different sounds; therefore, both pitch contour change on "deebo" AND using the different word "dahbo" would have an effect on Cantonese-learning children's looking habits (i.e. they would look less at the deebo-labeled object in both cases). In a tone language, variations in pitch distinguish different words. Therefore, a change in pitch contour may not have had a comparable impact on English-learning children. However, Cantonese-learning children would more likely look towards the unbranded object if the pitch in "deebo" changed. Not sure if it would change based on "dahbo"? Since phonological structure is language dependent, different phonological distinctions (b v. v en español) and tonality can be important building blocks for language. Since Cantonese is a tonal language that also has phonological distinctions, we would predict that a child conditioned to the word deebo with a upward intonation would not respond to an experimenter asking them to find the deebo with a downward intonation. This is because in cantonese, tonality can differentiate meaning. If the experimenter asked a child to find the dahbo, we would also predict that the cantonese learning child would not respond either because of the phonological differences.
Consider the two sentences below. Please describe how similar and different the roles that the phrase 'the vase' plays in the sentences are. Elise broke the vase. The vase broke.
From a consequentialist perspective, the vase fills the same role in both sentences, as it fills the role of the thing that is broken. However, the first sentence clearly sets it up as the object being acted upon by the external actor Elise, whereas the second sentence simply notes it as breaking. These two sentences also show that the subject of a sentence need not necessarily be the active agent. In the first sentence, Elise is the subject and she is doing the action of breaking. In the second sentence, the vase is the subject but it is the recipient of the action of breaking. in the first sentence Elise is the subject and the vase is the direct object; the action of the sentence is happening TO the vase. The second sentence has the vase as the subject. In both sentence, the vase is breaking in the past tense, but the first sentence puts much more blame on Elise while the second one states that this has happened but does not blame a person.
Dell et al. demonstrated participants' ability to learn novel constraints on the structural positioning of sounds in their language by introducing experiment-wide constraints on the occurrence of some consonants and by observing that people largely complied with these constraints. Please describe the pattern of results that the authors would have observed if people had been unable to learn and/or apply such constraints.
In the "sef" and "fes" conditions either "s" or "f" was introduced experiment-wide as only an onset or coda to a syllable (similar conditions were employed in Experiment 2) which subjects complied with at a very high rate by the end of the four sessions, shown by the fact that speech errors did not include the "wrong" sound where it should never appear (e.g. "s" as an onset in the "fes" condition"). If subjects had not been able to learn and/or apply these constraints, speech errors should have included the "wrong" sound in the wrong place at a higher rate (i.e. comparable to the overall error rate). There were two groups that had two different experiment wide constraints; for the first, "f" was always at onset and "s" was always at coda. For the second, "s" was always at onset and "f" was always at coda. A second experiment added a level of complication by tying a vowel in with this combination. The types of errors that the experimenters found generally obeyed the experiment wide constraint indicating that people were plastic enough to learn the constraints. If people were unable to learn and/or apply the constraints the authors would have seen a higher rate of illegal errors for the experiment wide constraint (a "seng" with "s" as teh onset in the "f" onset condition). The experiment wide constraint would be the same strength or weaker than the local constraints showing that participants were only misspeaking for other reasons rather than the rules imposed by the experiment.
Consider the made-up word 'trook' in the following sentence: "Can you hand me the trook?" Please indicate what you can conclude regarding the word trook, and specify what knowledge of English you used to reach that conclusion.
Just like with the DAX study, we know that "the trook" (like "the DAX") refers to a general term, rather than just "trook" (like "DAX") which would refer to a specific object. This is because of the determiner that comes before the noun. Based on the sentence, we know that trook is a direct object that is small enough to fit in someone's hand and be passed around. The fact that this is an object is based on the determiner "the"; if the sentence had read "Can you trook with me?" an English speaker would assume that trook is an action or a behavior that can be done. If the sentence had read "Where is trook?", an english speaker would assume that this is a name of a specific object.
Phonemes can be viewed as the abstract units of a sentence's phonological structural. Please provide at least one piece of evidence that phonemes are abstract units.
Phonemes are abstract units that do not represent meaning. By linking abstract units (phonemes) together you can create words which have discrete and unrelated meaning. For example "dog" and "log" have completely different meanings, despite the difference of only one phoneme.
Speakers of English intuitively know that the plural of the proper noun Bach (i.e., Bachs) should be pronounced with a final /s/. Although the final sound of the word 'Bach' is not a sound of English, English speakers nonetheless identify it as unvoiced and not articulated in a place close to /z/ or /s/. They then apply the phonological rule of English plural formation. Consider the word 'pulse', which also ends with /s/, even though the sound that precedes it, /l/, is voiced. Do you think 'pulse' is an exception to the rule? Please justify your answer.
Pulse is not an exception to the rule because it is a singular noun. Therefore, its combination of distinctive features do not have to obey the phonological rules of English plural formation because it is not a plural form. Pulse is not an exception to the rule. Idk why yet LOL. Figuring it out. Although pulse ends with a sound /s/, it does not end with an "s" ortographically as Bachs does. Pulse the word itself could be a noun (for example "the pulse of music is electrifying"), but when you add an "s" it becomes pulses which is not a plural, but rather a verb (for example, "the music pulses through the speakers"). Therefore, this is not an exception morphologically nor ortographically.
In American Sign Language, verbs of motion are characterized by different elements, each one indicating different aspects of the motion such as the class of objects involved in the event, the type of path traversed by the moving object, the manner of motion along this path, and the spatial relationship between the moving object and other landmarks, and all of those elements are produced simultaneously. Do you think this is compatible or incompatible with the claim made by Senghas et al. (2004) that one of the hallmarks of language is its combination of discrete units?
Senghas studied the formation of Nicaraguan Sign Language; he formed his hypothesis based on the fact that hearing spanish speakers would combine both the manner and direction in one gesture, but as Nicaraguan Sign Language began to develop more and more "speakers" of this language seperated direction and manner. The discrete elements of ASL both mirror the NSL formation of language and is compatible with Senghas' claim. The use of different gestures for ASL aligns with Senghas view because the elements make a language that is economical with the vocabulary (i.e. not having a different word for every single permutation of of motion), but still communicates the necessary parts of the meaning.
The syntactic tree of an English sentence is represented below. Please fill in the bottom of the tree with words forming an English sentence whose syntactic structure corresponds to the one captured in the tree.
The bird in the tall tree sings.
Based on what we discussed in class, what do linguists and psycholinguists mean when they claim that people have a mental grammar of their language?
The expressive variety of language use implies that a language user's brain contains a set of unconscious grammatical principles. Mental grammar is the complete collection of the rules, or patterns, of language. Mental grammar is the combination of the innate knowledge of the universal grammar (that could be applied to any language) and the learning that occurs based on the envirnoment in which the child is raised. Mental grammar is the set of patterns that allow a person to create and understand novel setnences.
The following sentence can be interpreted in two very different ways. Please paraphrase the sentence in two ways to demonstrate you understand the ambiguity involved. Next, explain why the ambiguity arises: "The governor is a dirty street fighter"
The governor is one to fight dirty streets, or the governor is a street fighter who is dirty. The difference in meaning shows in syntactic structure, not phonological structure. There are two different syntactic structures that result in the same string of words. The classification of words into parts of speech determines these patterns. This isn't so different from other studies of what goes on in the brain - ie. Muller Lyer or Duck Rabbit illusion. The ambiguity arises because dirty could either apply to streets or to the way that the governor fights. In the first interpretation, the sentence says that the governor scuffles in unclean streets; in the other interpretation, the governor does not fight fairly in the streets.
Two syntactic structures are represented in the form a trees. Please propose a single sentence of English that can be analyzed in terms of both of those structures. (note: 'Art' stands for 'article', 'N', for noun, 'V', for verb, 'NP', for noun phrase, 'VP', for verb phrase, 'P', for preposition, 'PP', for preposition phrase, and 'S', for 'Sentence').
The man sits in the chair with the broken leg thing The man hit a neighbor with the red convertible. The _____ ____s the ____ with a adj _____ The girl likes the boy with the big nose?
Jackendoff describes the knowledge that people have acquired of their native language as patterns or rules. Would you say that rules of language are probabilistic or deterministic? In answering, provide an explanation of what a deterministic or probabilistic rule is, and justify your opinion with course material.
The way children acquire knowledge of their native language is deterministic, meaning that the same form is consistently applied to the same situation rather than probability-matching different forms at different rates. Hudson Kam & Newport's Experiment 3's data supported this, indicating that children tend to regularize forms rather than probability-matching them, even though the latter strategy would result in a more accurate representation of the language. Deterministic means regularized. Probabilistic means that something conforms to statistical changes. The creation of mental grammar is deterministic. In Hudson Kam and Newport we see that youth in the critical period regularize scattered inconsistencies in their environment (for example they imposed a regularized use of the determiner despite noise determiners) while adults acquired the rules of this new language in a probabilistic way. Furthermore, we see this in youth who regress from saying "hold" to saying "holded" which is the overregularization of the past tense formation to illustrate the youth is no longer probabilistically repeating what he/she/they hear in the environment and is instead applying their mental grammar to the situation.
If a speaker erroneously produced the phrase "hit the hall" instead of the intended phrase "hit the ball", does the speech error obey a local constraint? Does it obey a language-wide constraint? Please justify each of your answers.
This error is a transposition of the onset, which means that it obeys a local constraint because "h" from the onset of "hit" replaces the "b" from "ball." It obeys a language wide constraint which is that "h" can only occur at the onset in the English language.
