Chapter 9 Language Test Bank

Chapter 9

Language

Test Bank

Multiple Choice

1. The study of language structure and change is called ____.

a. sociolinguistics

b. neurolinguistics

c. linguistics

d. psycholinguistics

ANS: c REF: Introduction KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

2. Language is most accurately described as ____.

a. communicative, statically symbolic, and productive

b. regularly structured, communicative, and statically symbolic

c. structured at multiple levels, dynamic, and abstractly leveled

d. regularly structured, productive, and dynamic

ANS: d REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

3. Which property of language conveys the notion that we are able to exchange thoughts and feelings with others?

a. arbitrarily symbolic

b. structured at multiple levels

c. generative

d. communicative

ANS: d REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

4. On a planet where cows are called zoht!, the inhabitants use the name “zoht!” any time they refer to cows. A psycholinguist would argue on the basis of this fact that the aliens’ language is ____.

a. regularly structured

b. arbitrarily symbolic

c. dynamic

d. static

ANS: b REF: What Is Language?

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

5. Your twin nephews seem to have developed their own special language and, despite concentrated effort, you struggle to understand it. For reasons that are completely unclear to you, they call their favorite candy “osploth.” It has no ingredients that sound anything like the name they use nor is its actual name anything like “osploth.” Which property of language does this suggest?

a. arbitrary symbolic

b. productivity

c. the dynamic property

d. regularity of structure

ANS: a REF: What Is Language?

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

6. Symbols that resemble their referents in some way and are not arbitrarily symbolic are termed ____.

a. words.

b. phonemes.

c. morphemes.

d. icons.

ANS: d REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

7. According to the principle of ____, words mean what people agree that they mean.

a. conventionality

b. contrast

c. symbolic arbitrariness

d. differential meaning

ANS: a REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

8. According to the principle of ____, two different words have two at least slightly different meanings.

a. conventionality

b. contrast

c. symbolic arbitrariness

d. differential meaning

ANS: b REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

9. Dolores is learning English. She would like to say that it is almost time to go home. Instead, she says, “The time is almost her home to go.” Which property of language is Delores struggling with?

a. arbitrary symbolism.

b. productive quality.

c. regular structure.

d. dynamic property.

ANS: c REF: What Is Language?

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

10. Timmy said, “My name is Timmy Bogokowsy and I live on the corner of Phillis and Emerson Roads.” It is very likely that Timmy is the first human being in history to have uttered this sentence. This illustrates language’s ____.

a. regularity of structure

b. generative property

c. arbitrary symbolic reference

d. communicative property

ANS: b REF: What Is Language?

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

11. As Tyler and Taylor listen to the recitation of a poem by Edgar Alan Poe: “How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, / In the icy air of night!; To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells / From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.” Tyler focuses on the sounds of the individual words like “tintinnabulation” while Taylor focuses on the meaning of the stanzas. This is possible because language is ____.

a. regularly structured

b. structured at multiple levels

c. arbitrary

d. communicative

ANS: b REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember c

12. With technology, new words are developed in order to describe new concepts or products. The coining of new words and phrases refers to language’s ____.

a. regularity of structure

b. multiplicity of structure

c. dynamic quality

d. communicative property

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

13. An important characteristic of language is that it is ____, that is, language constantly evolves.

a. dynamic

b. arbitrarily symbolic

c. generative

d. productive

ANS: a REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

14. We can use language to produce an infinite number of unique sentences and other meaningful combinations of words. Thus language is ____.

a. regularly structured

b. evolved and evolving

c. inherently creative

d. differentially structured

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

15. Vincent is able to hear normally, but he struggles to understand what is said to him. Vincent appears to have problems with _____.

a. generative language

b. phonemic production

c. adaptive language skills

d. verbal comprehension

ANS: d REF: Verbal Comprehension

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

16. ____ refers to the ability to produce written and spoken linguistic output, such as words, sentences, and paragraphs.

a. Encoding

b. Decoding

c. Verbal comprehension

d. Verbal fluency

ANS: d REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

17. The ____ is the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance from another.

a. phoneme

b. morpheme

c. syntax

d. lexicon

ANS: a REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

18. In English, ____ are made up of vowel or consonant sounds

a. morpheme

b. percepts

c. phoneme

d. lexicons

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

19. North American English has about 40 ____, while Hawaiian has about 13.

a. morphemes

b. percepts

c. phonemes

d. tropes

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

20. ____ is the study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written symbols

a. Discourse

b. Phonemics

c. Phonetics

d. Allophones

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

21. Tameron is visiting a village in a remote area for the purpose of seeing how the villagers produce and combine various speech sounds. He is also interested in how the various sounds are written as symbols. Tameron is interested in ____.

a. discourse

b. phonemics

c. phonetics

d. allophones

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

22. The smallest unit of meaning within a particular language is the ____.

a. phoneme

b. morpheme

c. lexicon

d. trope

ANS: b REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

23. It is estimated that one language dies out about every ____.

a. month

b. three months

c. six months

d. year

ANS: b REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

24. The study of the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance from another in a particular language is called ____.

a. discourse

b. phonemics

c. phonetics

d. allophonics

ANS: b REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

25. A(n) ____ is the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person’s linguistic repertoire.

a. lexicon

b. allophone

c. verbiage

d. vocabulary

ANS: a REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

26. The average adult speaker of English knows about ____ morphemes.

a. 20,000

b. 40,000

c. 80,000

d. 160,000

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

27. By combining morphemes, most adult English speakers have a vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words.

a. hundreds

b. thousands

c. hundreds of thousands

d. hundreds of billions

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

28. ____ refers to the systematic way in which words can be combined and sequenced to make meaningful phrases and sentences.

a. Semantics

b. Syntax

c. Pragmatics

d. Linguistics

ANS: b REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

29. Which of the following correctly identifies the two parts that are present in every sentence?

a. verb phrase and predicate

b. subject and noun phrase

c. verb phrase and noun phrase

d. adjective phrase and article

ANS: c REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

30. In the sentence, “The physics student dropped the ball,” dropped the ball is the ____.

a. adjective clause

b. noun phrase

c. article

d. verb phrase

ANS: d REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

31. In the sentence, “The physics student dropped the ball,” the physics student is the ____.

a. adjective clause

b. noun phrase

c. predicate

d. verb phrase

ANS: b REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

32. Semantics is the study of the ____.

a. structure of language

b. meanings of words

c. production of speech

d. acquisition of language

ANS: b REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

33. Which level of analysis goes beyond the level of the sentence and can include things like conversations, paragraphs, or even an entire written work?

a. conventionality

b. generativity

c. discourse

d. syntax

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

34. Boundaries between phonemes are often not discrete and may overlap. This overlapping of phonemes is called ____.

a. allophonics

b. holophrasology

c. discourse

d. coarticulation

ANS: d REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

35. When decoding spoken language it is necessary to separate the continuous stream of sound into distinct words. This process is referred to as ____.

a. coarticulation

b. discourse

c. segmentation

d. reintegration

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

36. We can perceive as many as ____ phonemes per second in a language in which we are fluent

a. 30

b. 40

c. 50

d. 60

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension

KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

37. When confronted with nonspeech sounds, on the other hand, we can perceive ____ sound per second

a. less than one

b. 3 to 5

c. 7 to 10

d. 15 to 20

ANS: a REF: Language Comprehension

KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

38. The ____ effect involves integrating what we know with what we hear when we perceive speech.

a. phonemic-restoration

b. categorical perception

c. continuous perception

d. phonemic-segmentation

ANS: a REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

39. Jan hears her brother say, “don’t forget the *ist”. Although her brother coughed while saying the last word, Jan is certain he said list. Her ability to perceive *ist as the word list is referred to as the ____ effect.

a. continuous perception

b. semantic completion

c. phonemic-restoration

d. phonemic-segmentation

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

40. Although the speech sounds we actually hear are made up of a continuum of variation in sound waves, we experience speech sounds ____.

a. categorically

b. morphemically

c. continuously

d. phonemically

ANS: a REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

41. Edmund has a brain injury to the area of motor cortex that affects his lips. You would expect that Edmund’s speech perception would be ____.

a. completely unaffected

b. affected for speech sounds affecting the lips and tip of the tongue

c. moderately affected for all speech sounds

d. profoundly affected for all speech sounds

ANS: a REF: Language Comprehension

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

42. The ____ effect involves the synchrony of visual (the speaker’s lip movements) and auditory (speech) perceptions.

a. categorical-perception

b. TRACE

c. phonemic-restoration

d. McGurk

ANS: d REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

43. _____ includes both the denotation and connation of a word.

a. Semantics

b. Holophrasic

c. Verbal fluency

d. Telegraphic speech

ANS: a REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

44. The strict dictionary definition of a word is its ____.

a. construction

b. interpretation

c. denotation

d. connotation

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

45. A word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other nonexplicit meanings are its ____.

a. constructions

b. interpretations

c. denotations

d. connotations

ANS: d REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

46. Semantics is to syntax as ____.

a. structure is to meaning

b. meaning is to structure

c. nouns are to verbs

d. verbs are to nouns

ANS: b REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

47. ____ is concerned with the structure/construction of meaningful phrases and sentences.

a. Phonetics

b. Morphemics

c. Syntax

d. Semantics

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

48. ____ is the study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns.

a. Semantics

b. Pragmatics

c. Grammar

d. Linguistics

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

49. ____ grammar specifies the “correct” ways in which to structure the use of written and spoken language.

a. Descriptive

b. Prescriptive

c. Inferential

d. Logistical

ANS: b REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

50. Mel is a psycholinguist who is interested in characterizing the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language. She probably specializes in ____ grammar.

a. descriptive

b. prescriptive

c. pragmatic

d. inferential

ANS: a REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

51. You hear your brother say, “The dog was walked by Mom.” The next sentence you say, “This morning, John was hit by Mike,” has similar sentence structure. This similarity results from ____ priming.

a. systematic

b. semantic

c. syntactical

d. grammatical

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

52. Steve analyzes the order in which words appear in utterances. He probably specializes in ____ grammar.

a. inferential

b. prescriptive

c. phrase-structure

d. word-structure

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

53. ____ revolutionized the study of syntax by arguing that we must consider the syntactical relationships between sentences in addition to the interrelationships among phrases within sentences

a. Eleanor Rosch

b. Harry McGurk

c. Herbert Clark

d. Noam Chomsky

ANS: d REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

54. Chomsky proposed that in order to understand syntax one must consider interrelationships among phrases within sentences as well as ____.

a. syntactical relationships between sentences

b. semantic relationships among phrases within sentences

c. conceptual relationships between sentences

d. systematically-biased relationships in the passage

ANS: a REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

55. Transformational grammar refers to rules used to ____.

a. contrast prescriptive and descriptive grammar

b. generate surface structures from deep structures

c. interrelate bottom-up and top-down strategies to derive meaning

d. analyze a sentence’s classical concepts

ANS: b REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

56. ____ rules guide the ways in which an underlying proposition can be arranged into a sentence.

a. Prescriptive

b. Descriptive

c. Transformational

d. Connotative

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

57. ____ refers to an underlying syntactical structure that links various phrase structures through various transformation rules, while ____ refers to any of the various phrase structure that may result from such transformations.

a. Prescriptive grammar; descriptive grammar

b. Descriptive grammar; prescriptive grammar

c. Deep structure; surface structure

d. Surface structure; deep structure

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

58. The sentences, “Tommy greedily ate the chicken,” and “The chicken was eaten greedily by Tommy” have the same ____ structure, but have different ____ structure.

a. shallow; elaborative

b. surface; deep

c. elaborative; shallow

d. deep; surface

ANS: d REF: Language Comprehension

KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

59. According to Noam Chomsky, the mental lexicon ____.

a. contains only semantic meanings of each word

b. contains morphemes and semantic meanings of each word

c. contains semantic and syntactical information for each word

d. contains the spellings and semantic meanings of each word

ANS: c REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

60. ____ are ways in which items can be used in the context of communication.

a. Thematic roles

b. Coarticulations

c. Holophrases

d. Functional morphemes

ANS: a REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

61. The average, literate adult can read a passage of text at a speed of ____ words per minute.

a. 25-30

b. 100-150

c. 250-300

d. 350-400

ANS: c REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

62. When a person has a difficult time deciphering, reading, and comprehending written information he or she may have ____.

a. aphasia

b. malapropism

c. dyslexia

d. anomaly

ANS: c REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

63. Jay struggles with reading and is undergoing testing of his ____ skills, which involve his ability to identify letters.

a. orthographic

b. phonological

c. lexical

d. phonemic

ANS: a REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

64. People with ____ dyslexia often have been found to have abnormalities in certain chromosomes, most notably, 3, 6, and 15.

a. acquired

b. developmental

c. progressive

d. longitudinal

ANS: b REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

65. Which type of dyslexia is typically caused by traumatic brain damage?

a. acquired

b. developmental

c. progressive

d. longitudinal

ANS: a REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

66. ____ are used to identify letters and words and also activate relevant information in memory about these words.

a. Lexical

b. Semantic

c. Syntactic

d. Comprehension

ANS: a REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

67. ____ processes are used to make sense of the text as a whole.

a. Lexical

b. Semantic

c. Syntactic

d. Comprehension

ANS: d REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

68. ____ is an interactive process that allows us to retrieve the meaning of the word from memory.

a. Semantic access

b. Semantic retrieval

c. Lexical access

d. Lexical attainment

ANS: c REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

69. Carpenter and Just’s (1981) eye-movement studies revealed that, during reading, ____ words are fixated for a longer duration than ____ words.

a. function; meaningful

b. familiar; unfamiliar

c. initial; final

d. longer; shorter

ANS: d REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

70. When people speed-read, they show ____.

a. fewer and shorter fixations

b. more but shorter fixations

c. fewer but longer fixations

d. more and longer fixations

ANS: a REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

71. ____ combines information of different kinds, such as the features of letters, the letters themselves, and the words comprising the letters.

a. Lexical encoding

b. Lexical access

c. Semantic retrieval

d. Semantic encoding

ANS: b REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

72. What is the most basic level of processing in Rumelhart and McClelland’s Interactive-Activation Model?

a. word

b. phoneme

c. letter

d. feature

ANS: d REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

73. The word-superiority effect is also known as the ____ effect.

a. Hoffding

b. Hubel-Weisel

c. Reicher-Wheeler

d. Rumelhart-McClelland

ANS: c REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

74. In the ____ effect, letters are read more easily when they are embedded in words than when they are presented either in isolation or with letters that do not form words.

a. word-superiority

b. word-context

c. letter-identification

d. perceptual-facilitation

ANS: a REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

75. ____ encoding is the process by which we translate sensory information (i.e., the written words we see) into a meaningful representation.

a. Semantic

b. Syntactic

c. Cultural

d. Perceptual

ANS: a REF: Understanding Conversations and Essays: Discourse KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

76. ____ involves units of language larger than individual sentences.

a. Discourse

b. Syntax

c. Semantics

d. Pragmatics

ANS: a REF: Understanding Conversations and Essays: Discourse KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

77. Occasionally, readers encounter unknown words and must determine their meanings from the surrounding context. When this happens, readers with ____ use well-formulated strategies to figure out word meanings whereas readers with ____ use no clear strategy.

a. normal abilities; dyslexia

b. high verbal encoding; low verbal encoding

c. above-average intelligence; below-average intelligence

d. large vocabularies; small vocabularies

ANS: d REF: Understanding Conversations and Essays: Discourse KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

78. According to Kintsch, during reading, working memory temporarily stores ____.

a. words

b. ideas

c. syntactic structures

d. letters

ANS: b REF: Understanding Conversations and Essays: Discourse KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

79. According to the ____ hypothesis, readers make inferences based only on information that is easily available to them and then only when they need to make such inferences to make sense of adjoining sentences.

a. low-effort

b. simplistic

c. minimalist

d. basics

ANS: c REF: Understanding Conversations and Essays: Discourse KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

Essay Questions

1. What are the main properties of language?

ANS: Language is:

1. Communicative: Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language.
2. Arbitrarily symbolic: Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents: an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description.
3. Regularly structured: Language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings.
4. Structured at multiple levels: The structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level (e.g., in sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases).
5. Generative, productive: Within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances. The possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless.
6. Dynamic: Languages constantly evolve.

REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

2. What is a phoneme?

ANS: A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance from another (i.e., to change the meaning of a word). In English, phonemes are made up of vowel or consonant sounds, like a, i, s, and f. For example, the word sit contains the phonemes /s/, /i/, and /t/, and by changing the phonemes we can change the meaning of sit to sat, fat, and fit. Different languages use different numbers and combinations of phonemes. North American English has about 40 phonemes. Hawaiian has about 13 phonemes. Some African dialects have up to 60.

REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

3. Explain deep structure and surface structure.

ANS: In transformational grammar, deep structure refers to an underlying syntactical structure that links various phrase structures through various transformation rules. In contrast, surface structure refers to any of the various phrase structures that may result from such transformations. Many casual readers of Chomsky have misunderstood Chomsky’s terms. They incorrectly inferred that deep structures refer to profound underlying meanings of sentences, whereas surface structures refer only to superficial interpretations of sentences. This is not the case. Chomsky meant only to show that differing phrase structures may have a relationship that is not immediately apparent by using phrase-structure grammar alone.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Understand

4. Identify and discuss at least three processes that may be involved in dyslexia.

ANS: 1. Phonological awareness, which refers to awareness of the sound structure of spoken language (recognizing the different sounds that make up a word).

2. Phonological reading, which entails reading words in isolation. Individuals with dyslexia often have more trouble recognizing the words in isolation than in context.

3. Phonological coding in working memory. When people have difficulty storing phonemes in working memory and tend to confuse them more often, reading becomes increasingly difficult.

4. Lexical access, which entails one’s ability to retrieve phonemes from long-term memory. For example, how fast can a reader recognize the word pond when he sees it?

REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

5. What is lexical access and how is it related to reading?

ANS: An important aspect of reading is lexical access the identification of a word that allows us to retrieve the meaning of the word from memory. Most psychologists who study reading believe that lexical access is an interactive process. It combines information of different kinds, such as the features of letters, the letters themselves, and the words comprising the letters

REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

6. Explain how language and communication differ. Give an example of communication that does not involve language.

ANS: Language is the use of an organized means of combining words to communicate with those around us. It also makes it possible to think about things and processes we currently cannot see, hear, feel, touch, or smell. These things include ideas that may not have any tangible form.

Even so, not all communication—exchange of thoughts and feelings—is through language. Communication encompasses other aspects: Nonverbal communication, such as gestures or facial expressions, can be used to embellish or to indicate. Glances serve many purposes. For example, sometimes they are deadly, other times, seductive. Communication also can include touches, such as handshakes, hits, and hugs. These are only a few of the ways we can communicate.

REF: Introduction KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

7. Describe the principles of conventionality and contrast in relation to word meaning.

ANS: Two principles underlying word meanings are the principle of conventionality and the principle of contrast. The principle of conventionality simply states that meanings of words are determined by conventions—they have a meaning upon which people agree. According to the principle of contrast, different words have different meanings. Thus, when you have two different words, they represent two things that are at least slightly different.

REF: What Is Language? KEY: Bloom’s: Remember

8. Explain the view of speech perception as ordinary. What does it assume?

ANS: One approach to speech perception suggests that when we perceive speech, we use the same processes as when we perceive other sounds like the crowing of a rooster. These kinds of theories emphasize either template-matching or feature-detection processes. They suggest that there are different stages of neural processing: In one stage, speech sounds are analyzed into their components. In another stage, these components are analyzed for patterns and matched to a prototype or template. However, feature detection or template-matching is not enough; decision-making processes are required as well. This is because the speech we perceive may differ from the speech sounds that actually reach our ears: Cognitive and contextual factors influence our perception of the sensed signal.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

9. Explain the phenomenon of categorical perception of speech.

ANS: One phenomenon in speech perception that led to the notion of specialization was the finding of categorical perception—discontinuous categories of speech sounds. That is, although the speech sounds we actually hear are made up of a continuum of variation in sound waves, we experience speech sounds categorically. This phenomenon can be seen in the perception of the consonant–vowel combinations ba, da, and ga. A speech signal would look different for each of these syllables. Some patterns in the speech signal lead to the perception of ba. Others lead to the perception of da. And still others lead to the perception of ga. Additionally, the sound patterns for each syllable may differ as a result of other factors like pitch. The ba that you said yesterday differs in pitch from the ba you say today. But it is not perceived as different: It is perceived as belonging to the same category as the ba you said a few days ago or will say tomorrow. However, two nonspeech sounds, such as two tones, would be perceived as different. In this case, continuous differences in pitch (how high or low the tone is) are heard as distinct tones.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

10. What is the McGurk effect and why is it important?

ANS: When we listen to someone speak, we do not rely solely on the auditory signals we hear. We also use visual input to understand others. The McGurk effect demonstrates powerfully how we integrate what we hear with what we see. It involves the synchrony of visual and auditory perceptions: When watching a movie, an auditory syllable is perceived differently depending on whether you see the speaker make the sound that matches the pronunciation of the syllable or make another sound that does not match the syllable spoken. Imagine yourself watching a movie. As long as the soundtrack corresponds to the speakers’ lip movements, you encounter no problems. Suppose, however, that the soundtrack indicates one thing, such as da. At the same time, the actor’s lips clearly make the movements for another sound, such as ba. You are likely to hear a compromise sound, such as tha. It is neither what was said nor what was seen. You somehow synthesize the auditory and visual information. You thereby come up with a result that is unlike either. For this reason, poorly dubbed movies can be confusing. You are vaguely aware that the lips are saying one thing, and you are hearing something else entirely.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

11. What is semantics?

ANS: Semantics is the study of meaning in a language. Semanticists are concerned with how words and sentences express meaning. In semantics, denotation is the strict dictionary definition of a word. Connotation is a word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other nonexplicit meanings. Taken together, denotation and connotation form the meaning of a word.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

12. Identify and describe four areas of study that have contributed significantly to psycholinguistics.

ANS: Four areas of study have contributed greatly to an understanding of psycholinguistics:

• Linguistics, the study of language structure and change
• Neurolinguistics, the study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language
• Sociolinguistics, the study of the relationship between social behavior and language
• Computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, the study of language via computational methods

REF: Introduction KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

13. What is the concept of grammar as used by linguists?

ANS: Specifically, grammar is the study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns. These patterns relate to the functions and relationships of words in a sentence. They extend as broadly to the level of discourse and narrowly to the pronunciation and meaning of individual words. In your English courses, you may have been introduced to prescriptive grammar. This kind of grammar prescribes the “correct” ways in which to structure the use of written and spoken language. Of greater interest to psycholinguists is descriptive grammar, in which an attempt is made to describe the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

14. How are speech errors related to syntax?

ANS: Other evidence of our uncanny aptitude for syntax is shown in the speech errors we produce. Even when we accidentally switch the placement of two words in a sentence, we still form grammatical, if meaningless or nonsensical, sentences. We almost invariably switch nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, prepositions for prepositions, and so on. For example, we may say, “I put the oven in the cake.” But we will probably not say, “I put the cake oven in the.” We usually even attach (and detach) appropriate function morphemes to make the switched words fit their new positions. For example, when meaning to say, “The butter knives are in the drawer,” we may say, “The butter drawers are in the knife.” Here, we change “drawer” to plural and “knives” to singular to preserve the grammaticality of the sentence. Even so-called agrammatic aphasics, who have extreme difficulties in both comprehending and producing language, preserve syntactical categories in their speech errors.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

15. What is the word superiority effect and the sentence superiority effect?

ANS: In the word- superiority effect, letters are read more easily when they are embedded in words than when they are presented either in isolation or with letters that do not form words. People take substantially longer to read unrelated letters than to read letters that form a word. There is also a sentence-superiority effect: People take about twice as long to read unrelated words as to read words in a sentence.

REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

16. Describe Chomsky’s conceptualization of the relationship between syntactical and lexical structures.

ANS: Chomsky addressed how syntactical structures may interact with words (lexical structures). He suggested that our mental lexicon contains more than the semantic meanings attached to each word (or morpheme). In addition, each lexical item also contains syntactical information. This syntactical information for each lexical item indicates three things:

• The syntactical category of the item, such as noun versus verb;
• The appropriate syntactical contexts in which the particular morpheme may be used, such as pronouns as subjects versus as direct objects; and
• Idiosyncratic information about the syntactical uses of the morpheme, such as the treatment of irregular verbs.

How do we link the elements in our mental lexicon to the elements in our syntactical structures? Various models for such bridging have been proposed. According to some of these models, when we parse sentences by syntactical categories, we create slots for each item in the sentence. Consider, for example, the sentence, “Juan gave María the book from the shelf.” There is a slot for a noun used as (1) a subject (Juan), (2) a direct object (the book), (3) an indirect object (María), and (4) objects of prepositions (the shelf).

There are also slots for the verb, the preposition, and the articles. In turn, lexical items contain information regarding the kinds of slots into which the items can be placed. The information is based on the kinds of thematic roles the items can fill. Thematic roles are ways in which items can be used in the context of communication. Several roles have been identified. In particular, these roles are as follows:

• The agent, the “doer” of any action
• The patient, the direct recipient of the action
• The beneficiary, the indirect recipient of the action
• The instrument, the means by which the action is implemented
• The location, the place where the action occurs
• The source, where the action originated
• The goal, where the action is going

According to this view of how syntax and semantics are linked, the various syntactical slots can be filled by lexical entries with corresponding thematic roles. For example, the slot of subject noun might be filled by the thematic role of agent. Nouns that can fill agent roles can be inserted into slots for subjects of phrases. Patient roles correspond to slots for direct objects. Beneficiary roles fit with indirect objects, and so on.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

17. What is coarticulation and why is it important?

ANS:. What makes speech comprehension especially complicated is that often we pronounce more than one sound at the same time. This is called coarticulation. One or more phonemes begin while other phonemes still are being produced. For example, say the words palace and pool. They both begin with a p sound. But can you notice a difference in the shape of your lips when you say the p of pool as compared with the p of palace? You are already preparing for the following vowel as you pronounce the p sound, and this affects the sound you produce. Not only do phonemes within a word overlap, but the boundaries between words in continuous speech also tend to overlap. The process of trying to separate the continuous sound stream into distinct words is called speech segmentation.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

18. What is phrase structure grammar and what does this approach propose?

ANS: Early in the 20th century, linguists who studied syntax largely focused on how sentences could be analyzed in terms of sequences of phrases, such as noun phrases and verb phrases, which were mentioned previously. They also focused on how phrases could be parsed into various syntactical categories, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Such analyses look at the phrase-structure grammar—they analyze the structure of phrases as they are used.

Let’s have a closer look at the sentence: “The girl looked at the boy with the telescope.”

First of all, the sentence can be divided into the noun phrase (NP) “The girl” followed by a verb phrase (VP) “looked at the boy with the telescope.” The noun phrase can be further divided into a determiner (“the”) and a noun (“girl”). Likewise, the verb phrase can be further subdivided. However, the analysis of how to divide the verb phrase depends on what meaning the speaker had in mind. You may have noticed that the sentence can have two meanings: (a) The girl looked with a telescope at the boy, or (b) The girl looked at a boy who had a telescope. In case (a), the verb phrase contains a verb (V; “looked”), and two prepositional phrases (PP; “at the boy” and “with the telescope”). In case (b), the verb phrase would again contain the verb “looked,” but it has just one prepositional phrase (“looked at the boy with the telescope”).

The rules governing the sequences of words are termed phrase-structure rules. Linguists often use tree diagrams to observe the interrelationships of phrases within a sentence. Tree diagrams help to reveal the interrelationships of syntactical classes within the phrase structures of sentences. In particular, such diagrams show that sentences are not merely organized chains of words, strung together sequentially. Rather, they are organized into hierarchical structures of embedded phrases. The use of tree diagrams helps to highlight many aspects of how we use language, including both our linguistic sophistication and our difficulties in using language.

REF: Language Comprehension KEY: Bloom’s: Understand

19. What are the major methods of teaching reading in the U.S.? Based on your understanding of cognitive processes, which do you believe is best? Why?

ANS: In the English language, there are several approaches to teach children how to read. Some of the basic ones are the whole-word approach, the whole-language approach, and the phonics approach. In the phonics approach, children are taught how the letters of the alphabet sound and then progressively put them together to read two letters together, then three, and so on. In the beginning, only regular words are used that are pronounced as they are spelled. The whole-word approach teaches children to recognize whole words, without the analysis of the sounds that make up the word. Proponents of this approach consider it more interesting for young children than learning about phonics. And finally, the whole-language approach argues that words are pieces of sentences and reading should therefore be taught in connection with entire sentences. So children start to read by reading sentences rather than words. The teacher may assist them to read the same poem or story over and over again.

REF: Reading KEY: Bloom’s: Apply

20. What is discourse?

ANS: Discourse involves units of language larger than individual sentences—in conversations, lectures, stories, essays, and even textbooks. Just as grammatical sentences are structured according to systematic syntactical rules, passages of discourse are structured systematically. By adulthood, most of us have a firm grasp of how sentences are sequenced into a greater whole (discourse structure). From our knowledge of discourse structure, we can derive meanings of sentence elements that are not apparent by looking at isolated sentences.

REF: Understanding Conversations and Essays: Discourse KEY: Bloom’s: Understand