Deck 12: Language and Thought

Question 1

Language is primarily a system for:

A) building relationships
B) communication
C) survival
D) learning

Answer 1

B

Question 2

The underlying ____________ of all human languages is the same.

A) morphology
B) lexicon
C) structure
D) phonetics

Answer 2

C

Question 3

Which theoretical approach to language in the early 20^th century focused on the different levels of linguistic description?

A) Structuralism
B) Cognitivism
C) Behaviourism
D) Functionalism

Answer 3

A

Question 4

Which of the following is a language?

A) Honeybees' waggle dance
B) Swahili
C) Vervet monkeys' alarm calls
D) All of the above

Question 5

Why did American Sign Language receive a great attention in language research?

A) Because of its particular structural complexity that makes it different from the other sign languages.
B) Because it's the only sign language that uses body postures instead of finger, hand, and arm configurations.
C) Because of attempts to teach it to great apes.
D) Because it only uses finger configurations, maintaining hands and arms in fixed positions.

Question 6

What is the subject matter of Pragmatics?

A) The sounds of speech.
B) The meaning of words.
C) The rules about how words group into phrases.
D) The contextual aspects of meaning.

Question 7

What level of linguistic description is divided into 'articulatory', 'acoustic', and 'auditory'?

A) Lexical
B) Phonetic
C) Semantic
D) Phonological

Question 8

Which of the following is a suprasegmental aspect of phonology?

A) Stress
B) Syntax
C) Inflection
D) Prefix

Question 9

Dr Craig is a linguist who is investigating how the meaning of a word depends on the syntax of the phrase. Dr Craig's research focuses on the ___________ level of linguistic description.

A) lexical
B) syntactic
C) morphological
D) semantic

Question 10

What level of linguist description relates to the prefixes and suffixes of words?

Question 11

According to your textbook, what are the seven levels of linguistic description?

Question 12

The subdivisions of the semantic level of language include the _________ which relates to the word meaning, and ___________ which relates to how meaning depends on syntax.

Question 13

Linguists focus on __________ aspects of language which tend to be the same for all human languages.

Question 14

Language is primarily a system for _________, both factual and _________.

Question 15

Great apes are able to learn the Sign Language and use it to communicate complex thoughts to humans.

Question 16

Why did the Linguistic Society of Paris ban debates on the evolution of language in 1866?

Question 17

Which influential linguist argued that language is uniquely human and its development is independent from the development of animal communication systems?

Question 18

Human vocal system is uniquely suited to producing the range of vocalizations used in human languages.

Question 19

The 'low voice box' is a crucial structure of the vocal system and is unique to humans.

Question 20

Discuss the main views on the evolution of human language.

Question 21

________ are sounds that signal differences between words in a particular language.

A) Phonemes
B) Phones
C) Phonologics
D) Phonics

Question 22

Phonemes are commonly divided into:

A) Phones
B) Letters
C) Groups of letters
D) Vowels and consonants

Question 23

Which of the following statements regarding chimpanzees' language abilities is true?

A) The language comprehension skills of chimpanzees are equivalent to that of humans.
B) The language production skills of chimpanzees are equivalent to that of humans.
C) The language comprehension and productions skills of chimpanzees are limited in comparison to that of humans.
D) Chimpanzees communicate through hand gestures rather than through vocalizations.

Question 24

Which of the following claims refers to a particular limitation of animal communication system according to your textbook?

A) Animal communication is strongly bound to the here and now.
B) Animal communication doesn't involve the exchange of social information.
C) Animal communication doesn't involve the exchange of useful information.
D) Animal communication is limited to the exchange of information related to food.

Question 25

According to the theorist Robin Dunbar, what replaced physical grooming in humans?

A) Social grooming
B) Self-grooming
C) Vocal grooming
D) Mental grooming

Question 26

Which of the following languages derives from Proto-Indo European linguistic lineage?

A) Latin
B) Classical Greek
C) Sanskrit
D) All of the above

Question 27

What is the common linguistic ancestor of Latin and Sanskrit?

Question 28

Chomsky distinguished between linguistic _________, what people know about their language, and linguistic _________, the use of language in everyday circumstances.

Question 29

Describe the two reasons behind Chomsky's claim that children get very poor evidence about the grammatical rules of their language.

Question 30

According to Chomsky, how can children acquire a language despite being exposed to very poor evidence about its grammatical rules?

Question 31

What is a Universal Grammar according to Chomsky?

Question 32

According to Chomsky, children are born with a Universal Grammar.

Question 33

Describe Chomsky's theory of the language acquisition.

Question 34

Which of the following aspects has been overlooked by Chomsky's theory of language acquisition?

A) Structural similarities among different languages.
B) Humans' sensitivity to statistical patterns.
C) The vocal apparatus' development in children.
D) Children's utterances.

Question 35

Saffran (2003) showed that _________ infants were sensitive to statistical relations among syllables in streams of nonsense speech.

A) 8-month-old
B) 4-month-old
C) newborn
D) 12-month-old

Question 36

According to Markman (1989), when children hear new words they use ________ to guess the word's meaning.

A) previous knowledge
B) social context
C) heuristic methods
D) adults' non-verbal communication

Question 37

Speaking and writing are part of the __________ of language.

A) understanding
B) listening
C) reading
D) production

Question 38

Writing is to reading as ___________ is to ___________.

A) production; speaking
B) production; understanding
C) listening; understanding
D) understanding; production

Question 39

Most psycholinguists find it easier to carry out research on ___________ and with ____________ materials.

A) comprehension; printed
B) production; printed
C) comprehension; verbal
D) production; verbal

Question 40

What are the two main aspects of language use?

Question 41

On which aspect of language use (production or comprehension) have psycholinguists focused more?

Question 42

Listening and reading are part of the production of language.

Question 43

Describe the two main aspects of language use (i.e. production and comprehension).

Question 44

Which of the following written languages must be read from right to left?

A) English
B) Spanish
C) Hebrew
D) Russian

Question 45

According to your textbook, speech/text comprehension occurs in __________ stages.

A) two
B) three
C) four
D) five

Question 46

What is the 'segmentation problem' in spoken language comprehension?

Question 47

_________ is a store of knowledge about the words of a language.

Question 48

The syntactic analysis of language takes place in the very first stage of language comprehension.

Question 49

The segmentation problem is only relative to spoken language.

Question 50

What are the two models of language production presented in your textbook?

Question 51

Caroline is unsure whether to use the word 'children' or 'young' and inadvertently says 'chung'. This is an example of semantic:

A) clustering
B) fusion
C) combination
D) blending

Question 52

Much of the evidence for how speech production works comes from the study of:

A) speech errors
B) speech proficiency
C) bilingualism
D) aphasias

Question 53

Saying "the Lord is a shoving leopard" instead of "the Lord is a loving shepherd" is an example of:

A) blend
B) omission
C) spoonerism
D) substitution

Question 54

The Bernard Baars' SLIP paradigm is used to:

A) test the feedforward models of production.
B) induce spoonerisms experimentally.
C) reveal people's hidden thoughts.
D) create speech ambiguity.

Question 55

________ involves both comprehension and production.

A) Writing
B) Reading
C) Dialogue
D) Listening

Question 56

Why does most of psycholinguistic research use printed materials?

A) For convenience.
B) Because written language is the primary form of language.
C) For ethical reasons.
D) Because it's impossible to use any other material.

Question 57

What are the two main lines of research on reading?

Question 58

How are language disorders concerning reading also named?

Question 59

____________ dyslexias result from brain injuries and, unlike ____________ dyslexias, they tend to fall into relatively distinct categories of impairment.

Question 60

During reading the eyes do not move __________ along the lines of text. In fact, reading is characterised by small __________ movements, and ____________ between those movements.

Question 61

What are the movements along the lines of text called?

A) Fixations
B) Sequences
C) Jerks
D) Saccades

Question 62

During reading, the saccades cover on average about _________ letters.

A) three
B) five
C) seven
D) nine

Question 63

During reading, fixations last about:

A) a fifth to a quarter of a second
B) half second
C) three quarters of a second
D) one second

Question 64

Pauses during eye movements during reading are called __________.

Question 65

__________ are occasional backward eye movements occurring during reading.

Question 66

Name the two main theories of eye movement control.

Question 67

What is the main distinction between developmental and acquired dyslexias?

Question 68

_________ dyslexics tend to regularize the pronunciation of irregular words, failing to identify them properly.

Question 69

Surface dyslexic cannot pronounce strings of non-words.

Question 70

There are two routes of reading, as shown by evidence of double dissociation in dyslexia.

Question 71

Sequential bilinguals have learned one language first and then the other.

Question 72

Describe the main classifications of bilingualism according to your textbook.

Question 73

Arash grew up in an Iranian family in London, learning English and Farsi together. Growing up, Arash used English more often than Farsi. Arash's bilingualism is:

A) simultaneous and balanced
B) simultaneous and dominant
C) sequential and balanced
D) sequential and dominant

Question 74

Marco is an Italian man who can speak German as fluently as his own mother tongue. When he was 6 he attended a German international school in Rome where the only language allowed was German. Hence, Marco grew up as a bilingual, speaking Italian at home and German at school. Marco's bilingualism is:

A) sequential and coordinate
B) sequential and compound
C) simultaneous and coordinate
D) simultaneous and compound

Question 75

Which of the following types of bilingualism refers to the two languages being acquired in the same setting?

A) Dominant
B) Sequential
C) Compound
D) Coordinate

Question 76

Which of the following types of bilingualism refers to one language being used to a greater extent than the other?

A) Coordinate
B) Sequential
C) Compound
D) Dominant

Question 77

The cognitive impact of bilingualism:

A) is mostly detrimental
B) is slightly beneficial
C) is almost entirely beneficial
D) has never been investigated

Question 78

Provide an example of a simultaneous, compound, and dominant bilingualism.

Question 79

Bilingual children, compared to monolingual children, show a greater ___________ awareness.

Question 80

_________ refers to being fluent in two languages, while people that are fluent in more than two languages are called ____________.