Review Questions for Exam 3

A. Gopnik and Meltzoff (1984, 1986) followed children longitudinally and found that words that encode disappearance, like gone, appeared in children's vocabularies at about the same time as they were successful on a nonlinguistic task that measures understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of view. Results like these are used to provide support for the view that _______________________. a) cognitive development and lexical development go hand in hand b) whereas labeling affects memory for colors, the color lexicon of a language does not affect color perception in speakers of the language c) there is a strong correspondence between children's development of the understanding of means/ends relationships and the children's first use of words that encode success or failure, such as there or uh-oh d) there are core cognitive notions that are innate or universally acquired independent of language

A

In Korean, verbs are more frequent and more salient in input than they are in English. Interestingly, it has been found that children acquiring Korean seem to acquire verb and concepts of means/end relations (the kind of things that verbs encode) relatively _______________ in the course of lexical development than children acquiring English do. In contrast, English-speaking children had larger naming vocabularies and also showed a more advanced understanding of object categorization. These findings seem to be consistent with the Whorfian hypothesis (that language provides the categories into which we organize the world.). a) earlier b) later

A

In a study of language socialization comparing the speech German and American mothers' address to their 2-year-old children, Shatz (1991) observed that ______________ mothers were found to talk more about necessity ("You have to . . .") and obligation ("You must . . .") and to produce more negative statements, whereas the ________________ mothers talked more about intention ("I'm gonna . . .") and possibility ("That can . . .") and asked more questions. a) German; American b) American; German

A

In the expression of spatial relations, both English and Korean distinguish between containment and support: the bowl is on the table and the apples are in the bowl. However, Korean makes an additional distinction between loose containment (as in the apples in the bowl) and tight containment (as in a piece in a puzzle), whereas English does not have different words for loose and tight containment. Will adult speakers of Korean make more mental distinctions about containment than English speakers by virtue of their language? The answer seems to be YES, according to the results of a study by McDonough, Choi, and Mandler (2003) who observed that __________________. a) English speaking 9-to-14 month old children noticed the distinction between loose and tight containment in a preferential looking task, but English speaking adults didn't. b) English speakers could be induced to use either the relative or absolute frame of reference by manipulating the setting c) Speakers of an absolute language, when transported to a new place, can more accurately point in the direction of other landmarks than speakers of a relative language such as English. d) Spanish-speaking adults were influenced by grammatical gender in their choices between a woman's voice and a man's voice for some objects and animals supposed to talk in a movie, whereas English-speaking adults were not.

A

It is in the area of_________________, rather than_________________, that individuals with autism show the most clear and significant impairment. In some ways, the language profile presented by individuals with autism seems to illustrate the dissociability of language and communication and the separate contributions to language acquisition of (1) a computational mechanism for acquiring the grammar and (2) the social/cognitive underpinnings of communicative development. a) communicative competence; linguistic competence b) linguistic competence; communicative competence

A

Language development may lag behind nonlinguistic cognition, as it does in persons with______________, or it may exceed nonlinguistic cognitive abilities, as it does in persons with______________. a) Down syndrome; Williams syndrome b) Williams syndrome; Down syndrome

A

Loewenstein and Gentner (2005) presented preschoolers with a task in which they had to find a "winner" in a three-tiered box after they had seen where the "winner" was in a different three-tiered box. The position of the winner in the test box always corresponded to the position of the winner in the box they were shown. Half the children were just shown the position of the winner accompanied by the statement "Let's look at this one," and half were shown the position accompanied by a statement that labeled the relative location, such as "let's look at the one at the top of the box." Among 3½-year-olds, children who were provided the label were more successful at test than children not provided the label. Four-year-olds, in contrast, were generally successful whether or not they heard the label. Here is the question. These results were suggested to provide evidence that _________________ based on relational similarity is a form of thinking that is supported by language. a) analogical reasoning b) mathematical thinking c) thinking for speaking d) autobiographical memory e) theory of mind understandings

A

Neils and Aram (1986) compared the incidence of language disorders in the immediate families of children with and without language impairment. They found that, on average, 20 percent of the family members of children with language impairment also had some language impairment, compared with a 3 percent incidence of language impairment among the family members of unimpaired children. This finding seems to suggest that ____________________. a) specific language impairment may have a genetic basis b) the deficit underlying specific language impairment is a deficit in processing rapidly presented stimuli. c) morphemes having low phonetic substance are most challenging for children with specific language impairment d) something about the innate language acquisition device in children with SLI may be impaired e) some children may show a purely grammatical SLI, whereas other children show deficits that also include phonological memory

A

Phonological development may be affected by blindness. Blind children make more errors than sighted children in producing speech sounds that have _______________ articulatory movements (such as /b/, /m/, /f/), but they are not different from sighted children in their production of speech sounds produced by _____________ articulatory movements (such as /t/, /k/, /h/). This suggests that visual information, such as lip configuration, contributes to phonological development in sighted children (A. Mills, 1987). a) highly visible; nonvisible b) nonvisible; highly visible

A

Prelingually deaf children exposed to a sign language such as ASL pass through the same stages in the same order as hearing children exposed to a spoken language. They produce manual babbling, followed by single-sign productions, followed by multi-sign combinations, followed by morphological development and more complex syntax. a) True b) False

A

The course of sign language development in deaf children who are exposed to sign from birth is _____________ the course of spoken language development (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). a) the same as b) different from

A

The language delays characteristic of SLI are not even across domains of language. The areas of greatest weakness for children with SLI are ______________________. a) morphology and syntax b) vocabulary development c) articulation d) pragmatic development

A

Are you interested in children's ability to learn from imperfect input? Studies of deaf children who learn sign from their parents who are not themselves native signers show that __________. a) children make the same errors that are typical of late learners of a language b) although the parents make errors typical of late learners of a language, their children do not. c) children acquiring ASL make pronoun reversal errors at the same age that children acquiring spoken language do. d) According to Liddell and Johnson (1992), both oral and total communication programs deprive deaf children of the opportunity to fully acquire any language.

B

Blind children often fail to appropriately generalize words, using new words as names for specific referents rather than as names for _____________ (Dunlea, 1989), which suggests that visually accessible information plays a role in learning the extensions of categories. a) unfamiliar objects b) categories c) joint attended objects d) familiar object

B

The task of acquiring a vocabulary in a sign language is _______________the task of learning arbitrary symbol-meaning associations for a spoken language. a) a completely different from b) essentially the same as

B

Compared with mental-age-matched children without autism, children with autism show both similar vocabulary growth and similar understandings of word meanings. However, children with autism do not use words that refer to _________________, such as believe, figure, idea, and guess. a) individuation b) mental states c) perceptual salience d) physical motivation

B

One question that arises in characterizing the language of children with SLI is whether their language is only delayed or whether it is also deviant. Grimm & Weinert (1990) observed that German-speaking SLI children produced utterances with word order errors both at a higher rate than do typically developing younger children and with other structural features that are extremely unusual in German. The observations of Grimm & Weinert (1990) are used to provide argument for ___________. a) SLI as pure language delay b) SLI as having deviant grammars

B

Oral language development outcomes in deaf children with cochlear implants are extremely variable. The children who seem to do best are ______________________. a) those who have a means of communication (e.g., ASL) with their families prior to implantation b) the children who have the greatest residual hearing before the surgery c) Children born deaf to parents who cannot sign and who have been discouraged from learning sign language to communicate with their child d) those deaf children whose language environment from birth is completely oral

B

Peters (1994) suggests that because blind children are more dependent than sighted children are on speech as a means of social interaction, they are motivated to adopt a "pick it up and use it before you have time to analyze it" (Peters, 1994, p. 200) approach to language. This may explain why ___________________. a) grammatical development is relatively unaffected by blindness b) blind children frequently rely on rote-memorized formulaic speech to participate in conversation c) blind children sometimes fail to appropriately generalize the meanings of words—for example, they may use object labels as if they were names for particular referents rather than names for categories d) the mothers of the blind children used more direct imperatives (such as "Take the doll") and fewer yes/no questions (such as "Can you take the doll?") than did mothers talking to sighted children

B

Speakers of different language formulate experience for linguistic expression in quite different ways, depending on the type of their native language. In some languages such as English, verbs of motion encode the manner of the motion; in other languages such as French, motion verbs encode path. While English speakers have the option of not expressing manner by saying that the dog enter the house, they tend to say 'The dog ran into the house'. Similarly, while French speaker could have said that the dog was running when it entered the house, they tend to say 'Le chien est entre dans la maison encourant' (literally, The dog entered the house runningly). According to Dan Slobin (2001), this provides support for his _______________________. In other words, speakers of different language may attend to different information about a particular experience/event and encode such information for the purposes of talking about that experience/event. a) theory theory b) thinking for speaking hypothesis c) idea of language as the medium of thought d) idea that linguistic input provides a push to cognitive development

B

Spelke and Tsivkin (2001) tested the hypothesis that _______________ uses a particular language by training bilingual adults in both math facts and historical facts in one of their languages and then testing their knowledge of those facts either in the language of training or in the bilinguals' other language. They found that historical facts were retrieved with equal accuracy and speed regardless of the match between the language of training and the language of test, but math facts involving exact calculations over 4 were retrieved faster and with greater accuracy if the language of training and test were the same. a) analogical reasoning b) mathematical thinking c) thinking for speaking d) autobiographical memory e) moral reasoning

B

Studies of how children in special populations learn language shed light on ask how different human abilities contribute to the language acquisition process. For example, studying language development in ______________ can help us discover whether language depends on the auditory-vocal channel or whether language is a function of the human brain that can make use of other channels if the typical channel is unavailable. a) blind children b) deaf children c) children with specific language impairment (SLI) d) children with Williams syndrome

B

The "moved object" task is one of experimental tasks that have been widely used to assess children's understanding of ___________________. Sally Anne task is the classic "moved object" task. In this task, children were presented with two dolls, Sally (who has a basket) and Anne (who has a box). Sally puts a marble in her basket, and leaves the room. While Sally is away, Anne takes the marble from the basket, and hides it in her box. Finally, Sally returns to the room, and the child is asked three questions: (a) Where will Sally look for her marble? (b) Where is the marble really? (c) Where was the marble at the beginning? The critical question is the question in (a) - if children answer this by pointing to the basket, then they have shown an appreciation that Sally's understanding of the world doesn't reflect the actual state of affairs. If they instead point to the box, then they fail the task, arguably because they haven't taken into account that they possess knowledge that Sally doesn't have access to. The questions in (b) and (c) essentially serve as control conditions; if either of these are answered incorrectly, then it might suggest that the child didn't quite understand what was going on. A study by Baron-Cohen and colleagues (1985) showed that around 85% of typically developing children (aged around four) and children with Down's syndrome (aged around 11), but only 20% of children with autism (aged around 12) correctly answered question (a). For those who failed the task, they consistently say Sally will look for the object where it is (i.e., in the box), not where they saw it placed (i.e., the basket). a) spatial relations b) false belief c) analogical reasoning d) motion events

B

The rates at which children develop Theory of Mind understandings is closely related to their rates of language development, and among typically developing children, the more linguistically advanced are also more advanced in performance on Theory of Mind (ToM) understanding tasks. To explain this correlation between language and ToM, Jill de Villiers (2005) suggests that mental representation of false belief requires a certain kind of ____________ structure—one that allows one false proposition to be embedded in another true proposition. For example, in the sentence "Little Red Riding Hood believes that her grandmother will answer the door", the statement that "her grandmother will answer the door" is false, but the whole sentence is true. a) relative clause b) sentence complement c) coordinate sentence d) subordinate sentence

B

Verbs in English and Chinese seem to function differently. The grammar of Chinese allows verbs to be used as single-word utterances. In addition, Chinese verbs have narrower meanings than verbs in English. For example, where the single verb carry applies in English, the Chinese speaker needs separate verbs for carrying on one's back, carrying in one's arms, carrying in one hand, and so on (Tardif, 2006). These language specific properties may explain ______________________________. a) why young children in Argentina know more kinship terms than children of the same age in the United States, and children in the United States know more object labels b) the degree to which children's vocabularies show a noun bias c) why a few of children's very first words serve social purposes rather than being truly referential d) the difficulty to untangle cultural differences from linguistic differences

B

A typical 3-year-old will not appreciate that when Little Red Riding Hood knocks on her grandmother's door she expects her grandmother but really will be greeted by the wolf. This is because that these young children do not reliably show ___________________. a) understanding that other people have mental states b) autobiographical memory c) understandings of false belief d) understanding of spatial similarity

C

Box 10.4 include some examples of sentences produced by a 16-year-old child with SLI. One salient feature of the language use in these examples is that _______________________. a) the child with SLI adds grammatical morphemes to his utterances at the two- and three word utterance stage b) various subsystems of the child with SLI may be delayed to differing degrees, thus disrupting the usual synchrony of the various components of language development c) the child with SLI produces six- and seven-word utterances that are still missing some grammatical morphemes. d) the child with SLI has a deficit in phonological memory, that is, the ability to repeat a meaningless sequence of sounds (known as the nonword repetition task)

C

Children who are acquiring English tend to combine content words before they add grammatical morphemes to their utterances, leading to the telegraphic quality of children's early word combinations. By contrast, children acquiring Turkish add grammatical inflections to nouns and verbs, producing two morpheme utterances, before they combine content words (Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1985). This contrast in grammatical development most likely result from the crosslinguistic difference in ________________. a) the rate at which children acquire language b) how much adults talk to children c) whether the language has a rich and regular morphology d) the particular nouns that children know e) the nature and extent of modifications made in speech addressed to children

C

Children who are described as having specific language impairment (SLI) have ____________. a) cognitive delays or disorders b) sensory delays or disorders c) limited language development in a variety of areas d) a deficit in theory of mind understandings

C

Children with _______________ are particularly competent conversational partners. Compared with typically developing children of the same language level, they are better at maintaining a conversational topic over several turns and are better at repairing or revising their utterances when conversation breaks down. However, older individuals in more demanding communicative tasks do not do as well. Adolescents with _____________ have difficulties using language for social interaction, they perform poorly in referential communication tasks, have difficulty with the kinds of form-function mappings that need to be controlled in order to mark politeness appropriately, and have difficulty controlling reference in narrative production. a) SLI b) hearing impairment c) Down syndrome d) Fragile X syndrome e) autism

C

Research on children using American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language indicates that _______. a) the children have fewer vocabulary words than their hearing peers at the same level. b) the children have greater vocabulary words than their hearing peers at the same level. c) deaf children make the same types of errors and learn language elements in the same sequence as hearing children. d) deaf children make more errors, such as pronoun reversal, than hearing peers at the same level.

C

Sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL) or the Langue Signe Quebecoise (LSQ) are _______. a)composed mostly of iconic pantomimes which can be easily understood by anyone. b) artificial languages that were created to help deaf people fulfill minimal communicative functions. c) natural languages, containing all the grammatical complexities found in spoken languages. d) manual versions of spoken languages; in particular, ASL is the manual version of English and LSQ is the manual version of French.

C

Speakers of Spanish know the difference between fingers and toes and between a watch and wall clock, although the Spanish lexicon does not have different words for these things. This suggests that ___________. a) adults who have language have nonlinguistic ways of thinking when it suits the task at hand b) If language is the medium of thought, then acquiring language should have consequences for developing thought c) differences among languages do not seem to completely determine differences in thoughts. d) differences in the languages acquired might result in differences in the cognitive processes of the speakers of those languages

C

The average reading level of deaf high school graduates is roughly the fourth to sixth grade (Marschark & Spencer, 2003). According to a view by Wilber (2000), the deaf children who perform at the highest level in reading are ___________. a) those who learn to lip read b) Orally trained deaf children c) those who have deaf parents and acquired sign from infancy d) children who are identified as deaf at a younger age

C

The only reported difference between blind and sighted children in the rate of grammatical development is a delay in blind children's acquisition of verbal auxiliaries—the "helping verbs" such as can, will, do (Landau & Gleitman, 1985). This delay may result from the observation that __________. a) Studying language development in special populations provide insight on how aspects of cognitive and social development relate to language development. b) blind children have fewer words for objects that can be seen but not touched, such as "moon" or "flag", and more words for things associated with auditory change, such as "piano, drum, and bird". c) mothers of the blind children used more direct imperatives (such as "Take the doll") and fewer yes/no questions (such as "Can you take the doll?") than did mothers talking to sighted children. d) achieving joint attention is more difficult for blind children than sighted children. d. blind children show a greater use of social routines and unanalyzed, formulaic speech than sighted children do.

C

According to Vygotsky, there are basic thought processes that do not require language, and there are higher mental processes that do require language. Thus, according to Vygotsky, language is a tool used for thinking. In particular, some kinds of thinking are possible only by those _______________, and, therefore, there are some kinds of thinking that only humans can do. a) who can do mathematical calculation b) who do not remember very much what happened before they were 3 or 4 years old c) who acquired their second language after their primary school years d) who have language

D

All of the following hypotheses EXCEPT _________________ about the nature of the underlying deficit in children with specific language impairment are consistent with the suggestion that the cause of SLI lies not in the children's environment but in some characteristic of the children themselves. Each of the hypotheses concerning the underlying cause of SLI has some empirical support, but so far no single hypothesis has been able to account for the full range of phenomena that characterize SLI. a) deficits in nonlinguistic cognition b) deficits in innate grammar c) deficits in the ability to perceive, store, or process language input d) poverty of stimulus (that is, linguistic input)

D

An area of relative strength in the language development of children with Down Syndrome is_____. a) syntactic development. b) lexical development. c) use of narrative discourse. d) pragmatic development.

D

Box 10.1 illustrates the kind of grammatical construction produced by deaf adolescents who are orally educated with either oral or total communication methods. The particular type of syntactic errors made by these deaf adolescents suggests that ________________________. a) deaf children's limited ability to acquire spoken language results in their being less communicative than their language-learning peers once those peers have begun to talk b) oral vocabulary development in deaf children is delayed and proceeds more slowly than vocabulary development in hearing children c) by the babbling stage, deaf infants differ from hearing infants in both the quantity and the quality of sound production d) most deaf children do not fully acquire the grammar of the spoken language.

D

The low-functioning persons with autism compose about 50 percent of the autistic population. They either do not speak at all or have primarily __________ speech, which is the meaningless repetition of a word or word group previously produced by another speaker. a) babbling b) private c) visual d) echolalic e) monotone

D