Download LING 1010 Final Exam: Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory and more Exams Linguistics in PDF only on Docsity!
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LING 1010 FINAL EXAM 129 correct and
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Universality - ANSWER all human societies have language. all (medically normal) children acquire at least one language.
uniformity of EASE - ANSWER a child can acquire any of the world's languages within about five years.
uniformity of SUCCESS - ANSWER the child acquires a grammar that is nearly indistinguishable from that of his/her peers
Rapidity - ANSWER children acquire language much more rapidly than other information of similar Complexity (algebra, calculus, etc.)
Consistency of stages - ANSWER children acquiring the same language pass through highly similar acquisition stages. the logical problem of language acquisition.
what are one of the central goals of linguistic theory? - ANSWER to solve the logical problem of language acquisition
What accounts for the ease, rapidity, and uniformity of language acquisition in the face of impoverished data? - ANSWER children are able to acquire a complex grammar quickly and easily without any particular help beyond exposure to the language because they do not start from scratch.
innate principles of UG such as structure dependency and X-bar theory, among many others, provide them with a significant head start.
The poverty of the stimulus - ANSWER the innateness hypothesis receives its strongest support from the observation that the grammars people ultimately end up with contain many abstract rules and structures that are not directly represented in the input they receive.
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Examples of the Poverty of the stimulus - ANSWER Rule for yes-no questions
the use of pronouns
Wh-questions
What type of language is English? - ANSWER SVO language
What type of language is Japanese? - ANSWER SOV language
Stages of language acquisition: newborns/neonates - ANSWER only biological noises (e.g. cry); categorical perception
Stages of language acquisition: 2-3 months - ANSWER cooing, mostly vowels and vowel-like sounds
Stages of language acquisition: 4-5 months - ANSWER first consonants [p] and [m]
Stages of language acquisition: 6 months - ANSWER first syllables (meaningless)
Stages of language acquisition: 7-9 months - ANSWER repeated babbling; intonation
Stages of language acquisition: 10-11 months - ANSWER variegated babbling
Stages of language acquisition: 12 months - ANSWER first real words
Stages of language acquisition: 12-18 months - ANSWER holophrases
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played. if the infant does not look at the visual enforcers, the researcher concludes that the infant did not perceive the change in sound
Production studies: At birth - ANSWER First vocalizations (first two months) are from discomfort (e.g., cry, scream), coughing, etc. Early-cooing (mainly vowel sounds). Soon afterwards, babbling (uttering linguistic sounds without meaning) starts.
Production studies: About 6 months of age - ANSWER Babbling - by around 6 months: canonical banking: more consonant-vowel combinations: ba ba
Production studies: About 10 months of age - ANSWER Babbling becomes restricted to the phonetic inventory of the native language. children already sensitive to the sounds of their mother tongue.
Variegated babbling starts
Deaf infants: vocal babbling until about 10 months. only manual babbling after 10 months.
Variegate babbling - ANSWER syllables may be repeated with a change in only a single segment: ba ba bi, gi ki gi.
Phonemes - ANSWER the building blocks for words
Allophone - ANSWER variants of a phoneme
Phonotactic constraints - ANSWER restrictions on possible combinations of sounds
When children start to combine sounds, the prefer the... - ANSWER CV-syllable structure (composed of two maximally different sounds: a consonant and a vowel)
overextension - ANSWER the child's word seems to encompass a broader class than the adult's. this might be because he has a different meaning for the word, or, that he lacks familiarity with the more specific terms and actually knows the adult meaning.
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syntactic bootstrapping - ANSWER the strategy of using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning
Children acquire the regular rules of the grammar and then... - ANSWER oversupply them
The Wug Test - ANSWER a classic experimental study of English-speaking children was based off the "wug test".
Children were shown a drawing of a nonsense animal like the funny creature shown in the following picture. Each "animal" was given a nonsense name. The experimenter would then say to the child, pointing to the picture "this is a wug".
Then, the experimenter would show the picture of two of the animals and say, "now here is another one. there are two of them. there are two _____."
Telegraphic stage - ANSWER Children often sound as if they are sending a text message or reading an old-fashioned telegram (which only contains the required words for basic understanding). fo this reason, such utterances are sometimes called "telegraphic speech"
semantic bootstrapping - ANSWER the use of conceptual categories to create grammatical categories
word frames - ANSWER lexical contexts often used by adults such as "the _ one" that assist a child learning language to categorize words in this case adjectives
Children exposed to ASL from birth: - ANSWER milestones of acquisition are comparable to those for spoken languages.
Same evidence for UG - knowledge in the absence of experience
Children exposed to ASL between 6 months to one year: - ANSWER infants use their hands for babbling.
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types of bootstrapping - ANSWER prosodic, syntactic, and semantic
stages of language acquisition - ANSWER - babbling = vocal practice
-holophrastic stage = 1 word
-overextension = "too broad" meaning
-vocabulary explosion = rapid word learning
-telegraphic stage = 2 or more words
-grammar explosion = function words and morphemes
-overgeneralization = "too broad" application of rules
Characteristics of child-directed speech (CDS) - ANSWER -special speech register used by some adults when talking to children
-high pitch
-short sentences
-few grammatical errors
Bilingualism - ANSWER - a person who learned two languages natively and is equally fluent in both
- a person who learned 2 languages at home, but can only speak one of them fluently, although, he/she can get by on the other language
- a person who was exposed to two languages at home, but can only speak one of them, although they can understand the other language perfectly
Stages of bilingual language acquisition - ANSWER - around 1 year old: the child builds up words from both languages but keep them separate
- around 2 years old: the child starts forming sentences and often uses words from both languages
- around 3 years old: the child starts to use less and less mixed sentences
- around 3.5 years old: the child acquires further vocabulary in both languages, but a single grammatical pattern is used
- around 4 years old: the child starts to use different grammatical rules for the different languages
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- around 5 years old: the child becomes aware of the social status of each language
Code-switching/ code-mixing - ANSWER alternating from one language or language variety to another back and forth during a conversation; it involves switching among words, phases and sentences from two or more different languages
interlanguage grammar - ANSWER a system of mental representations influenced by both their mother tongue (first language) and their target language (second language that they are in the process of acquiring).
Transfer is the process which... - ANSWER learners carry features/rules from their first language to the interlanguage grammar. this process is largely responsible for the presence of a foreign accent in the learner's speech.
The interlanguage grammar receives... - ANSWER influences from both the speakers' first language and the second language they are acquiring. As a result, the learner may produce sequences that are not "perfect" on either the languages that influenced it.
Communicative competence - ANSWER grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary competence, and sociolinguistic competence
Grammatical competence - ANSWER knowledge of the basic grammar of the target language
textual competence - ANSWER the ability to produce and comprehend the intent behind the use of a particular choice of utterance, and not only the plain use of words
Sociolinguistic competence - ANSWER ability to comprehend and adjust the level of the speech to different situations that may require more or less formality, as well as to different varieties of social dialects
factors affecting SLA - ANSWER age
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The speech wave can be displayed visually as a - ANSWER spectrogram, sometimes called a voiceprint
In a spectrogram, vowels exhibit - ANSWER dark bands where frequency intensity is greatest.
These dark bands on the spectrogram are called - ANSWER formants and result from the emphasis of certain harmonics of the fundamental frequency, as determined by the shape of the vowel tract.
The measurement of response times (RTs) shows that... - ANSWER it takes longer to retrieve less common words than more common words; longer to retrieve possible non-words that impossible non- words; longer to retrieve words with larger phonological neighborhoods than ones with smaller neighborhoods; and longer to retrieve lexically ambiguous words than unambiguous ones.
A word may prime another word if - ANSWER the words are semantically, morphologically, or phonologically related.
researchers can use various measures of electrical brain activity such as event related potentials (ERPs) - ANSWER to learn about language processing
To get the full meaning of an utterance, the listener must - ANSWER parse the string into syntactic constituents, because meaning depends on word order and constituent structure in addition to the meaning of individual words.
parsing - ANSWER mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases
Two important parsing principles are - ANSWER minimal attachment and late closure
minimal attachment says - ANSWER "build the simplest structure consistent with the grammar of the language"
late closure says - ANSWER "attach incoming material to the phrase that is currently being processed
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Top-down processing - ANSWER the listener relies on higher-level semantic, syntactic, and contextual information to analyze the acoustic signal. For example, upon hearing the determiner the, the speaker expects the next word to be a noun or adjective rather than a verb or preposition. in this instance, the listener's knowledge of phrase structure would be the source of information.
Bottom-up processing - ANSWER moves step-by-step from the incoming acoustic signal, to phonemes, morphemes, words and phrases, and ultimately to semantic interpretation. the listener uses acoustic information to build a phonological representation fo words that he can then look up in the lexicon.
Language is filled with temporary ambiguities - ANSWER points at which the sentence can continue in more than one way because of word category ambiguity or different structural possibilities.
Garden path - ANSWER a structural misanalysis in which he must backtrack and redo the phrase
Eye tracking techniques provide - ANSWER strong evidence that we humans have preferences in how we construct trees
Shadowing - ANSWER subjects repeat as fast as possible what is being said to them
Speech errors such as spoonerisms show that - ANSWER features, segments, words, and phrases may be conceptualized or planned well before they are uttered
Spoonerisms - ANSWER anticipation errors, in which a sound is produced earlier than in the intended utterance, show that we do not produce one sound or one word or even one phrase at a time
The attempt to understand what makes the acquisition and use of language possible has led to research on the - ANSWER brain-mind-language relationship
Neurolinguistics is the study of - ANSWER the brain mechanisms and anatomical structures that underlie linguistic competence and performance
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-calculation and analytical processing
-the right visual field
-temporal relations and other functions
-right handed individuals: language, speech, writing, and reading
Right hemisphere characteristics - ANSWER -tacticle recognition of material quantities
-visuospatial skills
-non linguistic auditory stimuli (including music),
-the left visual field
-some use of language in social context, and others
Language is lateralized to the... - ANSWER left hemisphere
Aphasia - ANSWER is the neurological term for any language disorder that results from acquired brain damage caused by disease or trauma
Lesions in the part of the left hemisphere called Broca's Area may suffer from - ANSWER Broca's aphasia, which results in impaired syntax and agrammatism.
Damage to Wernicke's area, also in the left hemisphere, may result in - ANSWER Weicke's aphasia, in which fluent speakers produce semantically anomalous utterances
Damages to yet different areas can produce - ANSWER anomia, a form of aphasia in which the patient has word-finding difficulties
Broca's aphasia is caused by damage to the - ANSWER inferior frontal gyrus.
Patients with Broca's aphasia have difficulties in - ANSWER planning the motor sequences used in speech or sign, as well as lack of functional morphemes (telegraphic speech)
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Patients with Wernicke's aphasia have damage to their - ANSWER Sylvian parietotemporal area (SPT) and the posterior temporal gyrus (STG)
Patients with Wernicke's aphasia have - ANSWER difficulty understanding others and also trouble selecting appropriate words from their mental lexicon, which often results in fluent but semantically "empty" speech
What Is the cortex's purpose? - ANSWER serves as the intellectual decision maker, receiving messages form the sensory organs and initiating all voluntary actions
What are the four lobes of the cortex? - ANSWER Frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal
The brain of all higher animals is divided into two - ANSWER cerebral hemispheres, which are connected by the corpus callosum
corpus callosum - ANSWER a network that permits the left and right hemispheres to communicate
Developmental dyslexia is - ANSWER an unexpected difficulty in reading. Unexpected refers to children and adults who appear to have all the factors necessary to become good readers:
intelligence, motivation, and exposure to reasonable reading instruction - and yet struggle to read
Children who undergo a left hemispherectomy experience - ANSWER an initial period of aphasia, but in certain cases may require a linguistic system like that of normal children
The plasticity of the brain decreases with - ANSWER age and with the increasing specialization of the different hemispheres and regions of the rbain
The critical-age hypothesis states that - ANSWER there is a window of opportunity for learning a first language.
