Deck 11: Later Language Acquisition

Question 1

The use of a regular morpheme in a word that is irregular, such as goed, is referred to as a(n):

A) overextension
B) overregularization
C) underextension
D) none of the above

Answer 1

overregularization

Question 2

Cross-linguistic differences generally reflect:

A) the formal complexity of a language
B) the amount by which parents and caregivers use child-directed speech
C) individual differences among the children studied
D) the conceptual complexity of a language

Answer 2

the formal complexity of a language

Question 3

Brown's (1973) study of grammatical morphemes found that the _____ morpheme was the earliest acquired.

A) possessive
B) present progressive
C) plural
D) past tense

Answer 3

present progressive

Question 4

Gleitman, Gleitman, and Shipley (1972) found that children's first attempts to judge the acceptability of sentences focused on:

A) simple, declarative sentences
B) wh- questions
C) semantic factors
D) holophrases

Question 5

To explain why children sometimes say "ringed" instead of "rang," Marcus (1986) proposed that children:

A) have no past-tense rules for irregular words stored in memory
B) have formed incorrect associations between sound sequences within a complex neural network
C) have stored irregular past tense rules, but occasionally misapply them
D) don't intrinsically understand time, so that the application of the rule is simply random

Question 6

Metalinguistic skills are thought to develop _________ the primary skills of speaking and listening

A) well before
B) just before
C) concurrently with
D) after

Question 7

Children's first negative sentences are of the form:

A) Doggie no bite
B) No bite finger
C) Doggie can't bite
D) Finger bite no

Question 8

In the sentence I want to go home, go home is:

A) a complement, consisting of a noun phrase that contains a verb
B) a coordination, consisting of a noun phrase that contains a verb
C) an object-relative clause, in which ball is the object of play
D) a gerund, in which the entire noun phrase is used as a verb

Question 9

Bloom, Rocissano, and Hood (1976) examined utterances in 19- to 38-month-old children and found the largest developmental increase in _____ speech.

A) nonadjacent
B) noncontingent
C) imitative
D) contingent

Question 10

Utterances that occur without a prior adult utterance, or without a pause after a previous adult utterance are called:

A) nonadjacent
B) noncontingent
C) imitative
D) contingent

Question 11

Cross-linguistic studies have revealed:

A) more about the rules of individual language than about general cognitive development
B) more about the cognitive functioning of individual children studied than about general linguistic processes
C) much about cognitive functioning and language strategies
D) so few differences in how children across cultures acquire language that it is more fruitful to study children within any single culture.

Question 12

Which of the following does NOT appear to influence the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes?

A) the semantic complexity of the morphemes
B) the syntactic complexity of the morphemes
C) the frequency of occurrence of the morphemes
D) the frequency of occurrence in the speech of parents or caregivers

Question 13

Which of the following phonological awareness tasks do kindergarten children find easiest?

A) given a word (for example, task), identify what is left when the first consonant is removed
B) given four words (for example, rat, dime, boat, mitt), identify the one with a different final consonant
C) given a word (for example, fish), supply a rhyme
D) given two words (for example, cat, at), identify the sound present in one that is missing in the other

Question 14

When asked to name a long word, children 4-5 years old might respond with a word such as train. This demonstrates that children:

A) do not understand dimensions, such as 'long' and 'short'
B) don't yet separate words from their referents
C) have a bias toward naming things that move, regardless of the question
D) don't follow conversational rules, and so their responses typically don't relate to the question asked them.

Question 15

Shatz and Gelman (1973) found that four-year-olds tended to simplify their speech when talking to:

A) their own younger sibling
B) two-year-olds
C) children who appeared not to comprehend
D) the elderly

Question 16

A paradigm that involves formulating a message to refer to an object or a picture is called a:

A) coordination task
B) language transfer task
C) referential communication task
D) imitation-reply-evaluation task

Question 17

Which is the following is NOT true of children's use of cohesion?

A) Children as young as 2 years old use cohesive devices, such as reference pronouns, verbal ellipsis, and conjunctions.
B) Once acquired, the relative proportion of cohesive devices remains stable from 3.5 to 9.5 years of age.
C) Children frequently use one pronoun (e.g., she) to refer to several characters in a single narrative.
D) The cohesive device most often used by children is repetition.

Question 18

According to Brown and Cazden (1973), a child was considered to have acquired a morpheme (such as /ed/ to indicate past tense):

A) the first time it was used correctly
B) the first time it was used in appropriate context, whether correct or not
C) when it was used in 90% of its obligatory contexts
D) when the child noticed an adult's incorrect use of the morpheme

Question 19

In observing children's acquisition of genres, Hicks (1990, 1991) found that children ________ more often when telling stories as opposed to recounting news events.

A) used the present tense
B) provided more evaluative remarks
C) used a factual reporting style
D) used ungrammatical sentences

Question 20

When children produce utterances such as Where I should put it? they have evidently failed to master the _____ transformational rule

A) wh- preposing
B) negation
C) noun phrase-auxiliary inversion
D) passive

Question 21

Williams (1980) examined the acquisition of the Spanish distinction between /p/ and /b/ in a group of native speakers of Spanish learning English as a second language. Williams found that the Spanish speakers:

A) could not acquire the distinction
B) showed a gradual shift from the Spanish VOT boundary to the English VOT boundary
C) acquired this distinction very rapidly
D) all of the above

Question 22

Providing speech and behavior appropriate for a given classroom situation is an aspect of:

A) joint pretence
B) referential communication
C) communicative competence
D) imitation-reply-evaluation sequence

Question 23

The words sand, mud, and air are:

A) count nouns
B) complex nouns
C) mass nouns
D) regular nouns

Question 24

Some studies of bilingual language acquisition have found that compared to monolingual children, bilingual children:

A) are severely delayed in their language development
B) lag behind their monolingual peers in some grammatical distinctions
C) are advanced in their language development
D) are capable of acquiring two or more languages as easily as one language

Question 25

Good readers in the elementary grades tend to be superior to poor readers in recognizing words:

A) by use of surrounding context
B) in an automatic fashion
C) by visual, non-phonological processing
D) by segmenting words into syllables

Question 26

Studies of teacher-student communication in the classroom have found that:

A) teachers tend to request more information from those who they consider to be low in communication skills
B) most classrooms have a high number of spontaneous student comments
C) most student comments are in direct response to a teacher query
D) children low in communication skills raise their hands as often as those with higher communication skills

Question 27

In general, studies have found that children's bilingualism:

A) improves their metalinguistic awareness
B) improves phonological awareness, but not awareness of other aspects of language
C) has no effect on their metalinguistic awareness
D) interferes with the acquisition of metalinguistic awareness

Question 28

Flege (1991) examined sounds that are hardest and easiest for second language (L2) learners to pronounce. He found that L2 learners do ______ on sounds that are very different from those in their native language, and ________with those that are moderately similar.

A) better; worse
B) worse; better
C) better; the same
D) worse; the same

Question 29

The notion that a child's first language (L1) influences acquisition of a second language (L2) is referred to as language ___________:

A) interference
B) borrowing
C) sequence
D) transfer

Question 30

Bialystok et al (2004) showed that _________ bilinguals performed ________ than monolinguals on the Simon task.

A) young, better
B) older, better
C) young, worse
D) older, worse

Question 31

Language interference tends to be less when:

A) one parent speaks one language and the other speaks another
B) both parents make an effort to speak both languages to the child
C) the languages are very similar to one another
D) all of the above

Question 32

Rozin et al (1974) showed kindergarten children short words such as mow, and long words such as motorcycle. _____% of the children were able to identify the short word.

A) 0
B) 10
C) 90
D) 95

Question 33

Most of the research on bilingual language acquisition comes from:

A) studies of children who moved from one language community to another
B) studies of adults who moved from one language community to another
C) case studies based on transcripts kept by researchers
D) case studies based on diaries kept by parents

Question 34

Schooled language is more _____ than unschooled language.

A) contextualized
B) decontextualized
C) interpersonal
D) colloquial

Question 35

Metalinguistic skills appear to be a significant factor in the acquisition of reading, particularly the awareness of:

A) lexical ambiguity
B) logography
C) phonological units
D) cohesive devices

Question 36

When children acquire two languages at the same time, their bilingualism is referred to as:

A) sequential
B) simultaneous
C) mutual
D) secondary

Question 37

For preschool children, the process of segmenting words into syllables (for example, hos-pi-tal) _____ the process of segmenting syllables into phonemes (for example, b-a-ll).

A) is easier than
B) is about as easy as
C) is harder than
D) is more related to learning reading skills than

Question 38

A form of discourse that children do not experience outside of school is:

A) imitation-reply-evaluation sequence
B) language transfer
C) narrative skill
D) referential communication

Question 39

Ricciardelli's (1992) examination of the relationship between bilingualism and problem solving showed that bilingualism:

A) improves problem solving
B) improves problem solving, but only when the problem is presented in the dominant language
C) has no effect on problem solving
D) interferes with problem solving