H240 True/False

Having words for things helps us to think of objects in terms of their properties.

True

How something we see is described to us affects how we recall it.

True

If you tell your girlfriend that you are crazy about her because your world revolves around her, you are mixing metaphors.

True

In signed languages, movement of a handshpae for verbs can indicate subject or object agreement

True

In the end, both Heather Artinian and her mother decided to obtain a cochlear implant.

True

In the word unlockable we cannot tell in isolation )i.e., without knowing its meaning) whether it is created using the prefix un- which attaches to verbs or the prefix un- which attaches to adjectives.

True

Kanzi, at first, learned signs without being explicitly taught.

True

Metaphors help us to frame problems.

True

Motel, smog, and workaholic are examples of blends in English

True

Non-verbal symbols can influence our cognitive behavior in the same ways that words do.

True

One similarity between linguistic and visual processing is that both have design flaws

True

Phrases in all languages have heads but the phrases exhibit parametric variation in terms of whether they are left-headed or right-headed

True

Prelinguistic infants in English-speaking households differ from English-speaking adults in characteristics of whatever it refers to.

True

Presenting men as pigs in a Trojan commercial is a live metaphor to the extent that we conceptualize men as literally related to metonymic attributes of the animal.

True

Red can cause failure on exams.

True

Signed languages obey the same general combinatory principles of phrase structure as spoken languages do.

True

Some languages have no grammatical gender, and do not even have different words for she versus he.

True

Structural ambiguity arises when a set of words can be put together in different ways that result in the same linear string.

True

Synapses are junctions across which neurons are excited, inhibited, or modulated.

True

The Muller-Lyer optical illusion is a cultural effect.

True

The ability of a Noun Phrase to contain a Prepositional Phrase which in turn contains a Noun Phrase, which in turn can contain another Preposiitonal Phrase, is an example of recursion.

True

The fact that a single string of words can have multiple meanings shows that syntactic structure is relevant to semantic interpretation.

True

The fact that sign languages emerge spontaneously among children in deaf communities around the world is evidence that human beings are hard-wired for language.

True

The grammatical relations "subject" and "object" can be defined in structural terms, for example, as "the NP immediately dominated by S" and "the NP immediately dominated by VP," respectively.

True

The head of a compound word in English is typically the component on the right.

True

The vagueness of conversational implicatures helps us to avoid conflict.

True

There is evidence from disorders that language and intelligence are doubly dissociated.

True

To think about time, Mandarin speakers are more likely to construct vertical timelines and English speakers horizontal ones.

True

We often associate the names of people with personality types and ethnicities.

True

When languages differ in terms for colors, they do so predictably; for example, if a language has only three color words, these will be for a distinction between warm (red + orange & yellow), light (white), and dark (black + blue&green).

True

When people retell a story, how they do so may be different depending on whether they have an absolute or relative orientation system.

True

Bee communication is like human language in that it is highly creative.

False

Bees use dances to share information with other bees about both the quality of and the distance to nectar, and they also use buzzing to describe obstacles in the way.

False

Children are just as likely to produce rats-eater to describe something that eats rats as they are to produce mice=eater to describe something that eats mice.

False

Children have to learn the universal principle of Structure Dependency.

False

Clairol's famous advertisement with the tag line, "Is it ture blondes have more fun?" communicates its message by presupposing that blondes are prettier than brunettes.

False

Creoles are choppy strings of words taken from two or more languages with variable word order and little grammatical machinery.

False

Deaf speakers of ASL use the same hemisphere of their brains to make linguistic signs as they do to gesture and to point

False

Derivation creates purely compositional meaning

False

Different physiology (vocal tract formation) from humans is hte basic reason why apes cannot learn human language.

False

English is an inflectional languages, just like Russian, and so has "free" word order.

False

For Mandarin-English bilinguals, their knowledge of English has no influence on how they concptualize time when speaking Mandarin.

False

Humans are the only primates which can distinguish yellow from green.

False

In many European languages, the grammatical gender of a word is determined by the sexual characteristics of whatever it refers to.

False

In normal individuals, Broca's area is in the left hemisphoere of the brain but Wernicke's area is in the right hemisphere

False

In the structure of words, derivation goes outside inflection.

False

Kanzi's use of language proves that bonobos share the innate principle of structure dependency with human beings.

False

Knowledge of statistical universals helps children to acquire the grammar of their languages.

False

Lazarus Geiger found that, in general, the more recent a text was, the color terms it tended to contain.

False

Most left-handed people process language using the right side of their brain, and about half of ambidextrous people do.

False

Not only were Washoe and Nim Chimpsky were able to learn many signs (words), but they could also make complex, systematic, and structured word combinations.

False

Nouns are an example of a closed class part of speech (category)

False

OSV is not an attested word order in any of the world's languages thus far, although principles of phrase structure predict it to be a likely order and linguists believe many extinct languages had OSV word order.

False

Our brains are like cheap cameras, unable to compensate for changes in lighting conditions in language which we speak.

False

Our brains are like cheap cameras, unable to compensate for changes in lighting conditions in perceiving colors.

False

People who say "Ain't nobody gonna do that for you" cannot think logically.

False

Relative orientation systems are inherently better for navigational purposes than are fixed (absolute) systems.

False

Russian speakers are quicker than English speakers at distinguishing light ("sky") blue from dark ("navy") blue because, as children, they typically spend hours on end staring at the vast expanses of Russian sky.

False

Sign language aphasics show very different kinds of symptoms than hearing aphasics do.

False

Structure dependency is a parameter of language which children must learn by listening to whether adults obey it or not.

False

"To let the cat out of the bag" is a mixed metaphor.

False

A bee from one species can learn the dance of bees from another if it is introduced into the hive young enough.

False

An argument against separating thought and languages can be made from evidence that linguistically deprived deaf toddlers reason very differently from hearing children thus demonstrating the need for linguistic input to stimulate thought.

False

That fact that no language makes a question from a statement by reversing all the words in the statement is an example of an implicational universal

False

The corpus callosum cannot be split without resulting in the death of a subject.

False

The fact that Inuit people have dozens of words for snow allows them to perceive different types of snow in a way speakers of English cannot.

False

The main difference between a Pidgin and a Creole is in their vocabulary.

False

The most likely explanation for why all human languages obey the same general principles is that they are all descended from a single "mother language" that arose in Africa some 100,000 years ago.

False

The only function of language is to communicate.

False

The principle of compositionality is important for morphology, but not for syntax.

False

The sentence Melissa mailed Ernest some aftershave from France is lexically ambiguous, but not structurally.

False

Tok Pisin, although acquired by many in Papua New Guinea as a first language and the native language of over one million people, is considered a Pidgin.

False

Trichromatic vision evolved together with a language, over the past 100,000 years.

False

Variation in color terminology is a product of biological differences in the eyes of various groups of people.

False

Vervet monkeys use alarm calls to inform other monkeys that a particular area is generally known for a particular kind of predator so they should be alert next time they go there.

False

Whereas hearing aphasics typically suffer damage in the left hemisphere, Sign Language aphasics typically suffer damage in the right hemisphere.

False

While they can convey information, facial expressions are not a real part of ASL grammar.

False

Speakers of Greek prefer temporal arrangements going from East to West

False.

Chomsky regards language as a finite computational system yielding an infinity of expressions.

Ture

Experiments suggest that having a word for a particular color facilitates our ability to discriminate that color.

True

Franz Boas rejected the 19th century view that unwritten languages were "primitive" and not as systematic and logical as European languages.

True

"Orange" juice is really closer to yellow than it is to orange.

True

A productive affix is one hwich can be added to many words in a given language.

True

According to Boroditsky, thought involves collaboration between linguistic and non-linguistic processes and representations.

True

According to the Whorfian view, aspects of human thought are determined by the specific language which we speak.

True

Although calls are produced year-round, birdsong is generally not produced in the winter.

True

Berlin and Kay proposed that there are canonical or ideal versions of primary colors, which they called "foci"

True

Color vision is an illusion, played on us by the nervous system and the brain.

True

Creoles spoken all over the world, although comprised of different language mixtures, tend to be strikingly similar in their grammars.

True

Dolphins are capable of responding to differences in word order.

True