chapter 11 cognitive psych
Which of the following is the best example of a garden path sentence?
Before the police stopped, the Toyota disappeared into the night.
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
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 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.
In the context of language, another term for "heuristics" is ________.
rules
The constraint-based approach to parsing states that
semantics is activated as a sentence is being read.
Which of the following terms best describes the concept of entrainment?
similarity
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 given-new contract is a method for creating
comprehension between a speaker and a listener in a conversation.
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 percent of the words spoken by their own voices.
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.
Which of the following is NOT a factor in prosody?
Semantics
In the lexical decision task, participants are asked to
decide whether a string of letters is a word or a nonword.
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.
Most of the coherence in text is created by
inference
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.
Lexical ambiguity studies show that people access ambiguous words based on
the meaning dominance of each definition of the word.
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 property below is NOT one of the characteristics that makes human language unique?
communication
Which term best reflects a musical composer who writes a film score in the key of E?
tonic
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. As 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
Which of the following statements is NOT accurate?
Semantics and lexicons are equal in scope.
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
Which set of stimuli would be the best selection for having people perform a lexical decision task?
Words "pizza, history" and nonwords "pibble, girk"
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
Which term best reflects the process of reading and understanding sentences in a story?
dynamic
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.
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
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.
Within the realm of conversational speech, knowledge refers to the
previously understood information that we bring into the conversation.
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.
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
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
The concept of language can best be thought of as a ________.
system
The crucial question in comparing garden path and constrain-based approaches to parsing is ____________________ is involved.
when semantics