language

What is the difference between a phoneme and an allophone?

-Phonemes are recognized as different sounds by speakers -Allophones are heard as the same sound by the speaker, they are alternate forms of phonemes (ex: PHone and Food)

Sign languages are not "real" languages but instead are pidgin forms of communication with no grammar of their own.

False

These are gestures that "bear close formal relationship to the semantic content of speech"

Iconics

Which of the following is not a way that languages can change over time?

Occidentally

This model of language relatedness addresses some of the inadequacies of the family tree model.

The Wave Model

Sometimes the phonetic characteristics of words in an ancestral language are very similar to that in daughter languages, except that some sounds have uniformly changed from one sound to another in the daughter language. Such a change is called _________________

a regular sound shift or an unconditioned sound change

Leonard Bloomfield's approach to the study of language is to focus on language like a descriptive scientist who observes, classifies, and measures physical phenomena. This approach is called...

behaviorist

Noam Chomsky's approach to the study of language is to develop general theories (or phrase structure rules) that explain why languages are the way they are. this approach is called

cognitive

The U.S. government's prohibition of Native American children speaking their indigenous languages in Indian schools has contributed most profoundly to

language death

The minimal sequence of sounds that carries lexical meaning or grammatical function is called...

morpheme

A stoplight is a visual example of which of the following?

sign

If Benjamin Whorf were trying to find further proof that grammar shapes the way people perceive the world, which of the following would not be a focus of his research?

the density of the population in the several communities

What is semantics?

the study of meaning in language