Ch. 7, 3, & 2
Pinker (1999) has argued that both an associative memory system (for word storage) and rule-based processes (for grammar) are the necessary ingredients for language. Damage or degeneration in _______________ affects lexical retrieval, including the ability to retrieve rote-learned forms such as irregular past-tense forms. Damage or degeneration in _______________ affects the ability to produce grammatical speech, including the ability to generate rule-governed regular past-tense forms.
the associative memory system; the rule-implementing system
*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 ______________________________.
the degree to which children's vocabularies show a noun bias
There are two competing views on the development of the left-hemisphere specialization for language in the adult brain. According to ____________, *the left hemisphere is not specialized for language at birth*, and language is initially represented in both hemispheres and shifts to the left hemisphere only with maturation.
the equipotentiality hypothesis
Creoles that arose independently in different places nonetheless have similar grammatical features that are universal characteristics of human languages. This observation has led to the hypothesis that _____.
the human mind tends to construct only certain kinds of languages
In a dichotic listening test, two different stimuli are presented simultaneously, one to each ear,and the listener is asked to report what was presented. Because the dominant neural connectionsare contralateral, information from the right ear reaches the left hemisphere before informationfrom the left ear does and vice versa. (The information presented to the left ear goes first to theright hemisphere and then must cross through the corpus callosum to reach the left hemisphereand vice versa.) Thus, if the listener reports hearing the stimulus presented to the right ear, theresearcher infers that _______________ is responsible for processing that stimulus.
the left hemisphere
Studies using fMRI have found that newborns and 3-month-old infants show greater left-hemisphere than right-hemisphere activation in response to speech stimuli—as do adults (Dehaene-Lambertz, Hertz-Pannier, & Dubois, 2006). In these infants, there was also greater left-hemisphere than right hemisphereactivation in response to nonspeech stimuli, suggesting that at birth the infant has a general bias toward processing sounds in ________________.
the left hemisphere
Newport (1991) offers one explanation for children's better capacity for language learning that relates to the amount of input one can remember. According to this explanation, it is easier to figure out the structure of language if you analyze small chunks than if you analyze longer stretches of speech. Small chunks are all that children can extract from input and store in memory. Adults, in contrast, extract and store larger chunks, thereby giving themselves a more difficult analytical task. Thus, children can remember less than adults, and this actually may help them in language learning. This explanation is referred to as _____________.
the less is more hypothesis
All of the following EXCEPT ____________ may serve as evidence that language is a *left-hemisphere function.*
*Bever and Chiarello* (1974) found that experienced musicians showed a right-ear (left-hemisphere) advantage for music, whereas naive listeners showed a left-ear (right-hemisphere) advantage for music.
Styles of language use associated with particular social settings or listeners are called registers. All of the following except ___________________ show that young children are sensitive to the use of different registers.
*Harris (2007)* noticed that higher SES mothers asked more question than did lower SES mothers and that children from 18 months to 5 years of age showed the same pattern of difference.
Wherever there are humans, there is language. This universal characteristic of human language could reflect ___________.
*both* the universal availability of models to learn from and the universal ability to learn language
L. Bloom and associates (1976) examined child-adult interactions and found developmental changes in the kind of contingent responses that children produced. The frequency of contextually contingent responses such as ________________ declined with age, whereas the frequency of linguistically contingent responses increased.
ADULT: Where's the other sock? CHILD: See my sitting on it.
All of the following except _______________may count as evidence for the idea that communicative development and linguistic development are somewhat separable strands of development.
Choi (1991) found that Korean children under the age of 2 years used different sentence-ending suffixes, depending on whether the sentence they were producing was a statement or a request.
Snow & Hoefnagel-Höhle (1978) conducted a study of the acquisition of Dutch as a second language by English speakers who moved to the Netherlands. The participants ranged in age from 3 years to adult. Snow and Hoefnagel-Höhle tested their participants' mastery of Dutch using a variety of measures of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and text comprehension, first 6 months after their arrival and then two more times at 4- to 5-month intervals. ______________ the prediction of the critical periodhypothesis, they found that the youngest children scored the lowest on every test and that the 12- to 15-year-olds showed the most rapid acquisition.
Contrary to
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 __________________.
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.
A very strong case for the genetics of language impairment was made by the discovery of a family (known as the KE family) in which 16 of 30 family members were seriously language impaired (M. Gopnik, 1990; M. Gopnik & Crago, 1991). The affected family members had both poor language abilities and severe difficulties with the motor aspects of speech production. Study of this family's DNA, combined with study of an unrelated child with a similar disorder who was discovered later, allowed researchers to identify the gene involved. It appears that the KE family has a mutation that affects the encoding of a particular protein known as _______________, which affects the formation of neural structures that are important for speech and language.
FOXP2
All of the following except _________________ provide evidence for the role of parents in children's narrative development?
French, Lucariello, Seidman, and Nelson (1985) found that when children share contextual knowledge, their conversations are longer and their language use is more advanced than when they do not share background knowledge.
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.
German; American
All of the following research findings except _____________ are consistent with the conclusion that genetics or biology plays a greater role in grammatical than in lexical development?
In the study of Johnson & Newport (1989), the participants who were less self-conscious about making errors and those who identified themselves as American showed greater mastery of English.
When patients with __________ speak, either they use words that are wrong for the meaning they are trying to express or they use made-up, meaningless words. Their speech has been described as "syntactically full but semantically empty".
Wernicke's aphasia
Chimpanzees have been successfully taught to use signs of American Sign Language to communicatewith humans. However, the chimpanzees' accomplishments always fall short of full acquisition of the language. Just what the differences are between chimpanzee and human linguistic abilities and what they mean is a matter of considerable debate. All of the following except _____________ show that Nim Chimpsky's language acquisition was very different from a human child's.
When Nim was taught a language that uses a vocabulary of abstract symbols, called lexigrams, what he learned was essentially a repertoire of rote-learned sequences associated with different situations and rewards.
A child who responds by saying "I like trucks" after her mother says "Eat your peas!" has demonstrated which of the following?
a non-contingent response
A child is fussing and staring towards a favorite blanket out of her reach. Her mother notices the child's distress and fetches the blanket of the child. This child has effectively engaged in what kind of communicative act?
a perlocutionary act
Joint attention is ________.
a social-communicative act in which *two persons jointly attend* to some third entity
According to the language bioprogram hypothesis (Bickerton, 1981), ___________.
an innate skeletal grammar guides and constrains the process of language acquisition & creation
*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.
analogical reasoning
The study of language impairment has provided the most detailed information about the genetic basis of language development. For example, a study by Stromswold (1998) found that adopted children with language-impaired biological relatives __________________ to be language impaired than adopted children with no language impairment among their biological relatives.
are more likely
The importance of communication for the development of language is that ________.
children appear to require a live communicative context to motive their learning.
Children's early narratives are said to be conversational in nature because __________.
children tell them in a conversational context in which their parents ask questions and probe for needed information.
All of the following except _____________ provide evidence for the role of maternal responsivity in language and communicative development.
children with *older siblings*—who provide competition for access to their mother as a conversational partner—are particularly skillful at entering and sustaining participation in conversations
*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 _______________________.
cognitive development and lexical development go hand in hand
According to Piaget, when preschool children engage in spontaneous conversations, they do not participate in true dialogue because, according to Piaget, the child is "unable to place himself at the point of view of his hearer" due to his egocentrism and has "no desire to influence his hearer or to tell him anything". According to Piaget, although preschool children may take turns talking, each speaker's turn has little to do with the previous speaker's turn. Rather, each child is producing his or her own monologue, albeit with interruptions for the other child's monologue. Accordingly, Piaget termed such interactions _______________.
collective monologues
As a result of _________________, the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, and information coming into sense receptors (e.g., the ears, the skin) on the right side of the body goes directly to the left cerebralHemisphere.
contralateral connections
Newport (1990) studied the sign language proficiency of deaf adults who ranged in age from 35 to 70, who used American Sign Language (ASL) in their everyday communication, and who had done so for more than 30 years. Some of these adults had acquired ASL as infants from their deaf parents. Some had first been exposed to ASL when they entered a school for the deaf between the ages of 4 and 6; some had first been exposed only after the age of 12, when they entered the school as teenagers, or later, when they made friends with or married someone from that school. She found that adults who were first exposed to ASL after early childhood _________________ those who had been exposed as infants.
did not perform as well as
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 ___________.
differences among languages *do not seem to completely determine* differences in thoughts.
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.).
earlier
The following Parent Child interaction illustrate an example of ____________style of parents' elicitations of past-event descriptions from young children. Studies have shown that a parent who provides ________________ scaffolding help the child tell richer narratives.
elaborative
*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?
false belief
The observation that the left hemisphere is specialized for language (and some other things), but the right hemisphere is specialized for processing visual-spatial information, is an example of _____.
functional asymmetry
*Brooks and Meltzoff (2005)* tested 10- and 11-month-old infants' __________________ abilities in an experimental setting. They then assessed these children's language at 18 and 24 months. The children who were better at _____________ at 10 to 11 months had bigger vocabularies at 18 months; at 24 months, they had bigger vocabularies and produced more complex sentences.
gaze following
*Camaioni and Perucchini (2003)* distinguished two kinds of pointing behavior in 11-month-olds: pointing for ________ purposes (e.g., the baby points at something he wants) and pointing for ________ purposes (e.g., the baby points at something just to get another person to look at what he is looking at). They found that children's use of declarative pointing was related to their understanding of other minds, whereas imperative pointing was not.
imperative; declarative
In the first aphasia study to establish that language is a left-hemisphere function for children as well as for adults, Woods and Teuber (1978) looked at 65 children who suffered unilateral brain damage to either the left or the right hemisphere. They found that aphasia almost always followed ___________ injury and rarely followed ___________ injury, just as is the case for adults. In addition, Woods and Carey (1979) observed that when left-hemisphere damage causes aphasia in childhood, it leaves "significant residual impairment". These results seem to support left-hemisphere specialization for language from birth.
left-hemisphere; right-hemisphere
*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.
mathematical thinking
By age 24 months, children start to refer to absent objects and events and to use language imaginatively, as in pretend play. These first references to past events are the beginning of ______________.
narrative development
Which of the following observations provides evidence for the many-to-many relationship between linguistic form and communicative function (e.g., a single linguistic form can be used for different functions or the same function can be expressed by different linguistic forms)?
one 2-year-old girl used simple imperatives in expressing requests to other 2-year-olds at preschool, but she usually modified her imperatives by adding "Please" in making requests to 3-year-olds, and she used questions when making requests of 4-year-olds.
Russenorsk, which arose when Russian and Norwegian fishermen needed to communicatewith each other, is an example of __________.
pidgins
The right hemisphere may be involved in the ___________ aspects of language use, such as *understanding jokes, understanding sarcasm,* interpreting figurative language, and following indirect requests.
pragmatic
Paul Grice (1975) proposed that conversation is guided by a spirit of cooperation that involves adherence to several conversational maxims. According to Paul Grice's Conversational Maxim of ________________, utterances should be as informative as the situation requires, but the contribution should not convey more information than is needed. For example, a father asked his daughter who was playing with a doll, "Which is your favorite animal?" The child did not verbally respond and continued playing with a doll; the child did not supply the information requested. As such, this is a violation of the Maxim of ________________ because the child was obligated to supply a response but did not take her turn to talk.
quantity
From the time Genie was 20 months old until her mother's escape when she was 13, Genie spent her time alone, strapped to a potty chair in a small bedroom. Genie did not talk at all when she was discovered. Four years later when she was 17, she scored in the range of a normal 5-year-old on standardized vocabulary tests, and her grammar was deficient in both production and comprehension. Dichotic listening tests showed that language was a _____________ activity for Genie.
right-hemisphere
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.
sentence complement
Parents (and others) teach children what to say *("Say Please"; "Say you're sorry")*, prompt children("What's the magic word?" "What do you say when you hurt someone?"), and directly praise children for appropriate speech and reprimand them for socially inappropriate speech. These observations suggest that ________________ is influenced by caregivers' active instruction of their children in particular forms of language use.
sociolinguistic development
Jia and Aaronson studied Chinese immigrants to the United States who were between 5 and 16 years old during their first year in their new country (Jia & Aaronson, 2003). All of the following except _____________ are part of their research findings.
some adults (approximately 5 to 25 percent, depending on the study) can achieve native-like proficiency in a second language.
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).
the same as
Ann Senghas studied the changes that occurred during the development of Nicaraguan Sign language. She found that the language moved from a structurally simple language to a structurally more complex language and that the differences in structural complexity appeared primarily in ___________.
the signing of those who began to learn the language at an early age.
Molfese and colleagues (1975) presented spoken syllables, spoken words, and nonspeech sounds to three groups: infants under 10 months old, children between 4 and 11 years old, and adults. Molfese and associates recorded the left- and right-hemisphere electrophysiological activity associated with presentation of each kind of stimulus. As expected, they found that most of the participants showed greater left-hemisphere activity in response to ___________ and greater right-hemisphere activity in response to_______________.
the speech sounds; nonspeech sounds
*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.
thinking for speaking hypothesis
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 ___________________.
understandings of false belief
Linguistic competence is the ability to understand and produce well formed sentences; while communicative competence include abilities to ___________________.
use language for multiple communicative functions (pragmatics), participate in conversation and relate a past event (discourse knowledge), and use language in a manner that is appropriate to the social situation and valued by your social group (sociolinguistic knowledge).
All of the following except _____________ present evidence that children's early use of gesture predicts language development.
when a child pointed to a cat, his mother said, "Yes, that's a cat," and when a child pointed to his baby sister and said "sleeping," his mother said, "Yes, baby's sleeping".
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 ________________.
whether the language has a rich and regular morphology
*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.
who have language
