Exam 9: Section 4: Language and Thought

The nativist position argues that language-learning capacities are built into the brain.

It is not uncommon for 5-year-old children to make more grammatical mistakes using the past tense than 3-year-old children.

Japanese infants cannot distinguish between the "l" and "r" phonemes.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can be recognized as speech.

Written language originated approximately 1 million years ago.

People are more likely to buy a product if they are told that it works 70 percent of the time than if they are told it fails to work 30 percent of the time.

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language.

The word "ball" is a morpheme consisting of three phonemes.

Nativist theories of language development are criticized because they do not provide an explanation as to how language develops.

Genetic dysphasia is a condition in which people with genetically based low intelligence cannot learn the basic grammatical structure of language.

Family resemblance theory holds that all members of a category share at least one feature in common.

Research on preliterate cultures has determined that the appearance of competency on reasoning tests depends more on whether the task makes sense to participants than on their problem-solving ability.

Some children who have their entire left brain hemispheres removed during adolescence as a treatment for epilepsy can recover many of their language abilities.

The orderly series of linguistic milestones primarily is due to cognitive development.

Grammar is a set of rules that indicate how phonemes can be combined.

Humans are better at judging frequencies than probabilities.

Parents spend little time teaching grammar to their children.

Damage to the lower left temporal lobe of the brain may result in the inability to identify humans.

A prototype possesses most, if not all, of the most characteristic features of the category.

Deep structure refers to the meaning of a sentence.