AP Psychology - Language

A 40-year-old man and his 7-year-old son move to a country where they have to learn a new language. Compared with his son, the 40-year-old man will? (A) have more difficulty learning to produce phonemes that do not exist in his native language (B) require less active processing to acquire the syntax of the new language (C) overregularize more often (D) learn the grammar of the new language more slowly but ultimately acquire the language better

have more difficulty learning to produce phonemes that do not exist in his native language

Wernicke's Area

hearing words and understanding them

What is the reason given in the text for why we think in images?

implicit memory, images can convey complex concepts, emotions, and connections more readily than language alone, allowing for richer mental representations

What does Linguist Noam Chomsky argue about language and languagedevelopment?

language is natures gift, an unlearned trait, separate from other parts of human cognition

Semantics

meaning of words and sentences

A word or part of a word that is in itself meaningful, but that cannot be broken into smaller meaningful units, is called a? (A) grapheme (B) morpheme (C) phoneme (D) holophrase

morpheme

At a year old, what stage of language development is the child at?

one-word speech ("kitty")

All human languages have several basic sounds in common called? (A) pheromones (B) semantic units (C) morphemes (D) phonemes

phonemes

Pragmatics

practical aspects of communicating with others, social niceties of language

What stage of language development is the child at, when they are older than 24 months?

rapid development into complete sentences

Phonemes

smallest distinctive sound units in a language (ex = "b", "a")

Broca's Area

speaking words

The utterance "likes dog my swim to" does not sound correct because it violates the rules of? (A) lexicon (B) syntax (C) fast mapping (D) morphemes

syntax

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis/ Linguistic Relativity

the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge and thought, language influences the way its speakers conceptualize the world

Overextension

the overly broad use of words, overgeneralizing their meaning (ex = Using "ball" for all round objects, a child might use the word "ball" to refer to a balloon, the moon, or a marble)

Statistical Learning

the process of learning language by recognizing patterns in speech

Syntax

the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language

Morphemes

the smallest language units that have meaning, including suffixes and prefixes (ex = "read", "er", "s")

One-Word Stage (Holophrastic Stage)

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words

At 2 years old, what stage of language development is the child at?

two-word speech ("get ball")

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

a mental structure that facilitates the learning of language because it is preprogrammed with fundamental language rules

What happened during the critical period?

a rush of language, master certain aspects of language

What is a baby's productive language?

ability to produce words

What is a baby's receptive language?

ability to understand what is said to and about them

Overgeneralization

applying grammar rules in areas they don't apply ("I writed a story"; goed; comed)

At 4 months old, what stage of language development is the child at?

babbles many speech sounds ("ah-goo")

At 10 months old, what stage of language development is the child at?

babbling resembles household language ("ma-ma")

Two-Word Stage

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements

Babbling Stage

beginning at around 3-4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds

Telegraphic Speech

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—"go car"—using mostly nouns and verbs.

Overregularization

extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, uses grammatical rule in situation where it doesn't apply (ex = using "mouses" instead of "mice")

Underextension

failure to understand a words larger meaning (ex = A child might only use the word "flower" to refer to roses, and not other types of flowers)

Maki is a three-month-old living in a household of Japanese speakers. Which of the following best describes how her ability to discriminate phonemes will develop?

Currently, she will likely be able to discriminate the phonemes \l\ and \r\; after she reaches about eight months of age, she will have begun to lose the ability to discriminate these phonemes

Which of the following outcomes is possible because researchers utilized the random selection process? (A) Confounding of variables (B) Replication (C) Causal conclusions (D) Generalization

Generalization

Linguistic Influence

Words influence, but do not determine, thinking

Which of the following concepts best describes the formal language acquisition stage of the six-to-eight-month-old infants in the study? (A) Babbling (B) Telegraphic speech (C) Formal operational (D) Overgeneralization

Babbling

Which of the following is an example of a stage of language development that occurs before a child can speak words? (A) Telegraphic speech (B) Babbling (C) Holophrase (D) Paraphrasing

Babbling

In homes where parents do not use correct grammar, their children tend to make more grammatical errors. Which of the following concepts identifies a type of error children might make? (A)Telegraphic speech (B) Babbling (C) Overgeneralization (D) Non-verbal manual gestures

Overgeneralization

By age six months, infants from different countries in the world will distinguish hearing a change in small units of sound. For example, in one study, when six-month old babies hear the RRR sound change to an LLL sound, they sucked faster on a special pacifier that measured their rate of sucking. By twelve months, however, Japanese children no longer distinguish these sounds since culturally, they are not exposed to them. Which of the following terms were researchers studying on a cross-cultural level? (A) Morpheme (B) Semantics (C) Phoneme (D) Syntax

Phoneme

If various cultures expect students to master more than one language in school, which of the following courses of action are supported by the evidence presented in the graph? (A) Students should be introduced to the second language as soon as they start going to school (B) If schools offer effective programs, students can easily become fluent in a second language as long as they start learning it in high school (C) Schools should not implement a second language program for the youngest students because that instruction might impede their ability to master their primary language (D) Schools should introduce students to a second language between the ages of 11-15 to get the strongest results

Students should be introduced to the second language as soon as they start going to school

Which of the following factors best represents an operational definition of the dependent variable? (A) The age in months of the infants being tested (B) The infants whose first language is English (C) The /ta/ versus /Ta/ sounds presented to the infants (D) The percentage of infants capable of distinguishing between the /ta/ and /Ta/ sounds

The percentage of infants capable of distinguishing between the /ta/ and /Ta/ sounds

Researchers proposed a study on language acquisition to see if exposing 10-month-old babies to phonemes outside of their primary language had an impact on the child's fluency in their primary language. Which of the following concerns would an IRB likely have about this study? (A) There would be no way to get informed consent (B) The procedure could potentially cause harm to the babies by interfering with their language development (C) There is too much deception involved in this research proposal (D) There would be no way to keep the information about each child confidential

The procedure could potentially cause harm to the babies by interfering with their language development

Researchers created a study to try to assess the extent to which 2-year-old children could detect emotion in telegraphic speech coming from adults. Children would be exposed to neutral phrases, happy phrases, and angry phrases. Which of the following statements about ethical guidelines is accurate for this study? (A) This research is unethical because the children may be uncomfortable with the different phrases (B) The researchers will first need to obtain informed consent from the parents of each child (C) The researchers will need to attempt to debrief the children prior to beginning the study (D) The study is flawed because researchers would not be able to maintain the confidentiality of the participants

The researchers will first need to obtain informed consent from the parents of each child