LING 352 Exam 1 | Questions and Answers (Complete Solutions)

LING 352 Exam 1 | Questions and Answers (Complete Solutions) Which best describes the relationship between phonological and lexical development? A) Phonological development leads lexical development: children's first words are composed of sounds within children's phonological inventory and children with larger inventories usually have larger vocabularies. B) Lexical development leads phonological development: as the size of children's lexicons gets larger, they develop more precise phonology in order to distinguish among the words C) Both answers A and B are true: the relationship between phonological development and lexical development is an interdependent one. D) Neither answer A nor B are true: phonological and lexical development operate wholly independently from each other The development of phonology depends on: A) Social and environmental factors almost exclusively B) Biological and physical maturational factors almost exclusively C) Both biological and environmental factors D) Computational and linguistic factors almost exclusively The content of infants' babbling is: A) Influenced by the language the infant hears B) Completely unrelated to language development C) Not influenced by the language the infant hears until s/he is using words D) The product of anatomical considerations Phonotactics refers to: A) Language specific constraints on the sequencing of sounds B) The variation across languages in terms of sound inventories C) The combination of consonants and vowels into syllables D) The way speech sounds are used to form new words Languages differ: A) languages do not differ in their sounds. B) only in terms of the inventory of sounds they use. C) only in terms of which sounds to convey changes in meaning. D) both in the inventory of sounds that they use and in terms of which sounds convey changes in meaning The development of infants' speech sounds follows the following trajectory: A) words, canonical babbling, non-redupicated babbling, vegetative sounds B) canonical babbling, non-redupicated babbling, vegetative sounds, words C) vegetative sounds, canonical babbling, non-redupicated babbling, words D) canonical babbling, vegetative sounds, words, non-redupicated babbling, Which of the following is a FALSE statement about children's early word recognition? A) Before 12 months of age, infants have difficulty recognizing familiar words when they are spoken in a different accent. B) Before 10 months of age, infants have difficulty recognizing that a word is the same one if it is spoken by speakers of two different genders. C) Before they reliably produce words, infants can recognize when a word has been mispronounced by as little as one sound D) Children show no evidence for recognizing words before they can produce words. Phonological awareness is: A) the ability to think about and reflect on the sounds of one's language. B) the ability to produce phonemes correctly. C) the ability to read an alphabet. D) not a particularly useful skill. The relationship between phonemes and letters of a conventional alphabet is: A) in a one-to-many correspondence: each sound may corresponds to many different letters, but each letter corresponds to one sound. B) in a many-to-many correspondence: each sound may correspond to many different letters and each letter may correspond to many different sounds. C) in a one-to-one correspondence: each sound corresponds to one letter and each letter to one sound. D) in a many-to-one correspondence: each sound corresponds to one letter but each letter may correspond to many different sounds. Phonological processes are: A) systematic sound changes that children make when producing sounds in their early words B) the processes through which children learn to perceive phonemes. C) the systematic order in which children develop the phonological system. D) the processes that languages use to organize phonemes. Which of the following constitute evidence that children's phonological development is influenced by environmental factors? A) the inventory of children's early sound systems differs depending on the language of the surrounding adults. B) parents who treat infant babbling as conversational speech encourage their children to produce more vocalizations than parents who do not. C) all of these are evidence for the importance of environmental factors on phonological development. D) infants adjust their speech as a result of feedback they receive from their own vocalizations during vocal play The three main articulatory dimensions used to describe consonant sounds are: A) manner of articulation, place of articulation, voicing B) stops, fricatives, and affricates. C) phones, phonemes, and allophones D) phonetics, phonemics, and distinctive features What do biologically and usage based theories of phonology focus on? A) Both biologically and usage based theories focus on the organization of the phonological system. B) Biologically based theories focus on the importance of computational constraints of phonotactics while usage based theories focus on how phonology is used in emerging literacy. C) Biologically based theories focus on the role of anatomical and physiological factors in development while usage based theories focus on the role of environmental input. D) Biologically based theories focus on the role of environmental input while usage based theories focus on the role of anatomical and physiological factors in development. Attempts to teach Chimpanzees human language have found: A) that they simply refuse to communicate with humans. B) that they have been unable to learn the grammar of a human language. C) that they learn language in very similar ways to human children. D) that their vocal tracts prevent them from learning a spoken language but they can easily acquire a sign language. The critical period hypothesis states that: A) there is a critical age range during which children are able to develop language. B) there is a critical length of time that is required for language to develop in children. C) children must be at least as old as the critical age before they can develop language. D) it is critical that adults provide input to children in order for them to develop language. A Pidgin is a: A) language developed by children who were taken out of one environment and placed in another before their first language syntax was complete. B) second language. C) communication system invented by people thrown together without a common language. It typically draws lexical items from one or more of the contact languages, and may develop its own primitive syntax. D) language that develops in second generations from the simple language that two groups have developed to communicate in the absence of a common language. The development of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL): A) has demonstrated how all sign languages are basically the same. B) has demonstrated the importance of explicit instruction in language creation. C) has demonstrated the importance of having fully formed input for language development. D) has demonstrated the importance of young children for adding complexity to a developing language. Adults' ability to acquire a second language acquisition depends on: A) their personal motivations to learn the second language. B) the type of social access they have to the second language. C) the age at which they are exposed to the second language. D) all of these factors influence how well adults acquire a second language. E) none of these factors influence how well adults acquire a second language. Deaf children who are born to hearing parents and receive later exposure to a sign language such as ASL: A) never become very proficient with sign language B) show patterns of acquisition that are similar to later learners of a second language C) learn sign language just as quickly and just as well as children who acquire it from birth D) deaf children born to hearing parents are unable to learn sign languages. Recent research on the genetic basis of language development suggests that: A) language development is wholly dependent on genetic effects. B) environmental effects have a greater influence on lexical development than on grammatical development. C) language development is wholly dependent on environmental effects. D) environmental effects have a greater influence on grammatical development than on lexical development. The invariance hypothesis refers to the view that: A) children cannot process language well at all. B) another term for the equipotentiality hypothesis. C) specialization for language is normally in the right hemisphere for children. D) the left hemisphere is specialized for processing language from birth. A Creole is a language that: A) is learned by children born into a community in which a pidgin language is used as a common means of communication. The children add to the language and develop syntax complexities. B) is acquired after a first language. C) is a communication system invented by people thrown together without a common language. It typically draws lexical items from one or more of the contact languages, and may develop its own primitive syntax. D) is developed by children who were taken from environment and placed in another before their first language syntax was complete. The human vocal tract is: A) well-adapted for producing speech sounds but carries an increased risk of choking on food relative to other species. B) well-adapted for producing speech sounds and better-adapted than most other species in terms of biological functions such as swallowing and breathing. C) not particularly well-adapted for either speech or biological functions such as swallowing or breathing. D) poorly-adapted for producing speech sounds but very well adapted for other biological functions such as swallowing and breathing relative to other species. The equipotentiality hypothesis holds that: A) language is equally well-processed by both hemispheres throughout the lifespan. B) the right and left hemisphere have equal capacity for language at birth. C) the left hemisphere is specialized for language at birth. D) the right hemisphere is specialized for language at birth Dichotic listening experiments examined adults and found that there is: A) a left-ear advantage for adult users of language. B) a right-ear advantage for adult users of language. C) evidence of the invariance hypothesis. D) a right-ear advantage for all auditory stimuli Efforts to study the neural processing of language in infants: A) has found that infants tend to be less lateralized and develop left-hemisphere specialization of language over time. B) cannot be done because there are no brain investigation techniques suitable for working with infants. C) has found that infants have right-hemisphere dominance for language from as early as they have been tested. D) has found that infants have left-hemisphere dominance for language from as early as they have been tested. The case of Genie is important for the study of language development because: A) it provides evidence that all children have an innate ability to learn language. B) it shows that children can develop language normally even after years of abuse C) it shows that children's later language skills and early experiences are largely unrelated . D) it provides evidence that could be argued to support the idea of a critical period for language. Aphasia is ____________________. A) a total loss of ability to speak B) mild language loss due to bilateral connections C) an impairment of language due to brain injury D) evidence of language learning capacity Which of the following are true about Infant Directed Speech (IDS)? A) Infants prefer to listen to IDS over Adult Directed Speech. B) all of these are true statements about IDS. C) IDS carries consistent emotional messages across different languages. D) IDS contains more prototypical vowels than Adult Directed Speech. Infants are called "universal listeners" because: A) they categorically perceive phonemes. B) they can discriminate among a large - perhaps universal - set of phones. C) they spend so much time listening to everything going on around them. D) they possess a universal grammar (UG) which allows them to process what they listen to into a grammar. Which of the following constitutes true evidence that infants can hear and learn about sounds in-utero? A) the fact that babies are born with the ability to make minimal pair discriminations of phonemes in any spoken language B) the fact that by 12 months of age, infants have tuned their perception to their native language. C) the fact that infants cry when they hear loud sounds after birth. D) the fact that 6 weeks after birth, infants prefer to listen to specific passages of poetry they were read in-utero. Infants who tune their perceptual system to their native language phonemes more quickly: A) show later difficulties with non-auditory aspects of language development. B) are not able to make categorical distinctions among phonemes. C) show more rapid language development in the word learning stage. D) are also more likely to retain the ability to perceive non-native phoneme contrasts. Joint attention is: A) a social-communicative act in which a person pays attention to transitions, or joints, in an event B) a social-communicative act in which a person jointly attends to both an object and another person C) a formal computational process required for attending to multiple stimuli D) a social-communicative act in which a person asks another person to join them in an activity To investigate whether or not an infant understood the meanings of words she did not yet understand, a researcher showed the infant pairs of objects on the screen and monitored her eye-gaze as one of the objects was labeled. This method is called: A) the functional near-infrared spectroscopy method. B) the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. C) the conditioned head-turn procedure. D) the habituation method Which type of feedback about their grammar usage are children likely to get from their parents? A) Direct and indirect feedback are both common types of feedback children receive about their language use. B) Children do not receive any explicit feedback about their language use. C) Direct feedback: when children say things incorrectly (e.g. "I holded the doll") parents tell the child they said it wrong (or, they said it silly) and tell them the correct way to say the sentence. D) Indirect feedback: when children say things incorrectly (e.g. "I holded the doll") parents are more likely to ask for clarification and when children say things correctly, (e.g. "I held the doll") parents are more likely to repeat the sentence back to the child. Studies of infants' statistical learning abilities have shown that: A) infants can use the statistical properties of their input to help them find words and also higher level elements such as grammatical categories. B) infants can keep track of statistical properties of their input, but they require hours (if not days) of exposure to make useful inferences. C) infants calculate simple t-tests to determine where word boundaries are. D) infants cannot calculate statistics. Which of the following provides evidence that, at least in part, children's language development depends on their general cognitive skills? A) the fact that children require input from a real live human being to be successful in language development. B) the fact that the left hemisphere of the brain is largely responsible for storing and representing language. C) the fact that there are disorders that can specifically target language ability D) the fact that the size of children's phonological memory predicts their vocabulary size. The importance of communication for the development of language is that: A) young children have no need to use language to communicate. B) communication plays no role in the process of language development. C) children appear to require a live communicative context to motive their learning. D) virtually all of language development can be explained in terms of communicative needs. Compared to children raised in high Socioeconomic households, children from low Socioeconomic backgrounds: A) hear substantially less language input but have equivalent sized vocabularies at age 3 years. B) hear approximately the same amount of language input and have equivalent sized vocabularies at age 3 years. C) hear approximately the same amount of language input but have substantially smaller vocabularies at age 3 years. D) hear substantially less language input and have substantially smaller vocabularies at age 3 years. Children's early use of gesture is: A) largely unrelated to children's language development. B) only important for children learning sign languages. C) predictive of children's language abilities and development. D) an impediment to children's language development because it allows for communication outside of language. Categorical Perception of phonemes refers to the fact that: A) we hear sounds as belonging to a single phoneme category, even though the acoustic differences between sounds are along a continuous dimension. B) the phoneme /b/ has a shorter voice onset time (VOT) than the phoneme /p/ has. C) Linguists can categorize all of the perceived sounds into phonemes. D) infants tune their perceptual system to categorize phonemes over the first year of life. Which of the following is NOT an example of early intention reading? A) an infant infers the probable goal of an adult by watching them attempt an action. B) an infant monitors a speaker's gaze to infer the object they are labeling. C) all of these are examples of early intention reading. D) an infant expresses her intentions by crying when she is hungry. A child is presented with a picture of an unfamiliar animal and told it is called "a hyrax". That child can use the Taxonomic assumption to draw which of the following inferences? A) the word "hyrax" can be extended to refer to all animals that look like animal in the picture. B) the child would refuse to learn the word "hyrax" because not enough syntactic context was provided with the picture. C) the word "hyrax" can be used only when talking about the single specific example of the animal shown in the picture. D) the word "hyrax" can be extended to refer to items that are thematically related to the animal in the picture, such as the type of food it likes to eat. Fast-mapping refers to: A) the ability to correctly reproduce the phonological form of a new word B) the phenomenon of overextension. C) the ability to learn the meaning of a new word based on only a few instances. D) the phenomenon of underextension Which of the following is a FALSE statement about the process of word segmentation: A) infants are able to use melodic and rhythmic cues to help them find word boundaries. B) it is facilitated by short pauses introduced after each word in spoken language. C) infants are able to use statistical cues within the speech signal to help them segment words by 9 months of age. D) it can be facilitated by properties of child directed speech, such as shorter utterances. Syntactic Bootstrapping is a word learning process that: A) children are unable to make use of until they enter school. B) helps children learn about words for footwear. C) requires children to have access to social-intentional information, such as eye-gaze. D) allows children to draw inferences about a word's meaning from the sentential context in which it is used. Looking at words across languages, researchers have found that: A) all languages use the same words so that each word in one language corresponds to a single word in each other language. B) regardless of content and frequency differences in the lexicons across languages, children are not sensitive to these differences until they enter school. C) there is very little overlap in word meanings across languages so that every language describes the world in arbitrarily different ways. D) languages differ somewhat in the contents of their lexicons, and also in their preferred ways of describing elements in the world. Children's first 50 words: A) are acquired very rapidly as soon as a child begins to talk B) consist of a variety of kinds of words, but at least in English, contain a relatively large number of nouns. C) contain no function words among them. D) are highly idiosyncratic and differ dramatically from child to child The definition of a word is: A) the smallest unit of meaning in language. B) a collection of phonemes that obeys a language's phonotactic rules. C) a sound that is used to communicate. D) an arbitrary symbol that refers to elements in the word Which of the following is TRUE about nouns and verbs in children's early word learning? A) Children require different kinds of information to learn nouns and verbs: noun meanings can often be learned through observation alone while many verb meanings require children to use syntactic information as well. B) All of these statements are true. C) Nouns and verbs typically refer to different kinds of meanings, and the meanings of nouns may be easier for children to learn. D) In some languages, nouns and verbs are present in approximately equal quantities in children's early vocabularies. Children's on-line processing of words: A) is something that researchers still have no way to measure.