Exam 5: Learning the Structure of Sentences

Method 6.2 explains some of the questions we can start asking by using computer simulations of language learning. Which principles or theories do you believe could be tested using a computer simulation and why?

Providing relevant examples, outline at least one argument to support the claim that sentence structure is hierarchical, that is, it involves the grouping of words into constituents rather than simply representing sentences as linear strings of words.

Lexical co-occurrence patterns would not help children

Do Bayesian models originate from the nativist or the data-driven perspective of language acquisition? Explain your answer.

The term _______ is used to describe syntactic frames for verbs that specify whether and how they can occur with nouns and the role of those nouns when paired with specific verbs.

Six-year-old Rohan participated in a new study, designed to be similar to the Wonnacott 2011 study. An artificial grammar was invented in which roi and des were both particles that followed animal words. During the learning phase, only roi appeared after the word elephant in a sentence. What will Rohan likely conclude?

A major benefit of constituents is that they

Which statement is a telegraphic expression that your 2-year-old brother might produce to convey "Pablo has eaten all of the candy."

What is a trigram? What did Mintz (2003) find about parents' use of the "frequent frames" contained in child-directed speech? How might these trigrams help children determine the categories to which words belong?

Explain how language is generative, and provide an example.

For the sentence below, propose a grammatical structure using bracket notation (or a tree) to represent the syntactic constituents and their parts. Be sure to show the hierarchical structure of the sentence and label the syntactic category of each word and constituent. She bought a house with a yard.

Imagine a 3-year-old is presented with a novel word in this passive sentence: The dog is being chased by the cat. If he were then asked what the cat is doing, he would be _______ when answering the question.

Define and relate semantics and syntax. Provide an example of how changing the syntax can change the meaning of a sentence.

Consider this sentence: The turtle that Tommy got from Hiroki for Christmas has a cold. What information is conveyed by the relative clause?

Which sentence below contains an intransitive verb?

The structure of a musical piece is similar to the grammatical structure of a sentence in that

Explain why the following sentence would not likely be produced by a child with specific language impairment (SLI): The bear that was hiding under the tree ran away. What could a child with SLI communicate about the bear?

Refer to this sentence: Now you can enjoy a gourmet meal in your sweatpants. Which of the following represent a noun phrase in the sentence?

If 9-month-old Hakim heard examples of fluent speech and disfluent speech, as in Soderstrom and Morgan's 2007 study, he would spend

Mintz's 2003 study found that information present in trigrams such as