Deck 7: Language development

Question 1

Dysfluent and halting speech that lacks grammatical structure and inflections is characteristic of those with damage to:

A) the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex
B) Wernicke's area
C) Prefrontal cortex
D) Broca's area

Answer 1

Broca's area

Question 2

Which of the following statements about Chomsky is false?

A) Chomsky's approach focuses heavily on productive speech
B) Chomsky argued that language is better understood as an innate mechanism
C) Chomsky believed that all languages are based on a set of abstract, unconscious rules
D) Chomsky, a linguist, subscribed to the nativist approach

Answer 2

Chomsky's approach focuses heavily on productive speech

Question 3

A rising tone at the end of a statement indicates it is a question.This use of tone to change the meaning is called:

A) inflection
B) intonation
C) morphemes
D) production

Answer 3

intonation

Question 4

Language processing is represented in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex for:

A) everyone
B) the majority of left-handed people only
C) the majority of right- and left-handed people
D) the majority of right-handed people only

Question 5

When a child says 'I runned home' they demonstrate:

A) exposure to poor adult language models
B) an overregularlisation error
C) syntactic bootstrapping
D) none of these answers is correct

Question 6

A child who demonstrates an understanding of a word after hearing it only once demonstrates:17)______

A) fast mapping
B) they have entered the period of vocabulary explosion
C) Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device
D) both A and C are correct

Question 7

Which of the following is an example of a constraint on early word learning?

A) whole-object assumption
B) mutual exclusivity
C) both A and B are correct
D) syntactic bootstrapping

Question 8

By the time they start school,children have learnt the meanings of how many words on average?

A) several thousand
B) several dozen
C) several hundred
D) fewer than 100

Question 9

Comprehension is also referred to as:

A) productivity
B) pragmatics
C) receptive language
D) expressive language

Question 10

Phonology is:

A) understanding the communicative acts of other people
B) the sounds used by the speakers of a particular language
C) the rules that govern acceptable word order within a language
D) the meaning of words and utterances

Question 11

Child-directed speech (CDS)assists language acquisition in the following way(s):

A) it helps infants make important speech discriminations
B) it increases the chance that the infant will pay attention to the adult
C) it helps facilitate speech segmentation and discrimination between vowel sounds
D) all of these answers are correct

Question 12

Researchers studying infants' categorical perception of speech sound conclude that this ability is likely:

A) due to experience
B) due to combined innate ability and experience
C) too difficult to determine since this ability does not emerge until children are older
D) an innate ability

Question 13

Infants first use gestures as a form of communication at what age?

A) 6 months
B) 12 to 18 months
C) 8 to 10 months
D) 12 months

Question 14

The characteristic rhythm,tempo and intonation patterns of a spoken language are referred to as:

A) phonology
B) pragmatics
C) inflection
D) prosody

Question 15

Which of the following statements is true?

A) research has provided poor support for the critical period hypothesis
B) bilingual studies do not support the critical period hypothesis
C) children must be exposed to a language early in life in order for them to master it
D) research has identified specific features of children's cognitive system that make them good language learners

Question 16

'Mummy eat','Doggie woof' and 'All gone' are examples of:

A) underextension
B) elegraphic speech
C) overextension
D) holophrases

Question 17

Which theorist proposed the 'language acquisition device' (LAD)?

A) Noam Chomsky
B) Lenneberg
C) B. F. Skinner
D) none of these answers is correct

Question 18

A child says to his parents,'The mans eated their breakfast.' According to the Environmental approaches,his parents may respond:

A) by recasting the phrase (e.g. 'Yes, the men were really hungry so they ate all their breakfast.')
B) by using an expansion (e.g. 'That's right. The men ate their breakfast.')
C) by asking a clarification question
D) All of these answers are correct

Question 19

A speech synthesiser is used to gradually change one speech sound into a related one.It is often used to study what ability?

A) phonemic awareness
B) prosody
C) categorical perception
D) none of these answers is correct

Question 20

Around what age are infants capable of identifying and remembering new spoken words? 14)______

A) 9-10 months
B) 11-12 months
C) 7-8 months
D) 5-6 months

Question 21

It is well agreed that,in language development,production precedes comprehension.

Question 22

Cooing emerges at approximately four months of age,and reduplicated babbling is typically evident at seven months of age.

Question 23

Most children do not begin to combine words into larger units until approximately 18 months to 2 years of age.

Question 24

One of the first challenges for children learning their native language is to distinguish,recognise and then reproduce the phonemes.

Question 25

The perceptual and information-processing limitations of young children help them to learn languages.

Question 26

Research findings suggest that infants are born with an ability to perceive the sounds of any human language.

Question 27

Adults rarely achieve full fluency of a second language unless it is acquired as a child.

Question 28

An example of an inflection is adding 'ed' onto the word 'jump' to form the past tense of 'jumped'.

Question 29

Young children learn grammar at a rapid rate partly because their parents often give them explicit instructions regarding grammatical rules.

Question 30

Learning to read is possible when a child has:

A) developed cognitive skills such as inference
B) an understanding of spoken language
C) an understanding of grammatical rules
D) both A and B are correct

Question 31

The period of 'vocabulary explosion' ends at approximately six years of age.

Question 32

Rules that govern word order are called grammar.

Question 33

The 'Whorfian hypothesis' suggests that you cannot think about an object,event or relation unless you have a _______ for it.

A) schema
B) concept map
C) word
D) memory

Question 34

Children can learn concepts before they have acquired labels for those concepts.This finding demonstrates:

A) support for a strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis
B) that a weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis is implausible
C) that you cannot think about a concept before you have a word for it
D) that our language does not entirely determine the way we think about the world

Question 35

For most right-handed people,the majority of language is represented in the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex.

Question 36

With increasing language experience,overregularisation errors decrease.

Question 37

Which of the following is believed to not be an important factor in one's reading comprehension?

A) age
B) working memory capacity
C) ability to make inferences
D) none of these answers are correct

Question 38

When children use the grammatical structure of a sentence to infer the meaning of a novel word,it is termed 'Semantic bootstrapping'.

Question 39

Child-directed speech often entails the use of exaggerated facial expressions with normal emotional tone.

Question 40

Evidence suggests that parents speak to their infants in a way that is likely to be very helpful for early language acquisition.

Question 41

Name and describe the three major stages of reading development as outlined by Frith (1985).

Question 42

It is possible to have complete understanding of a concept even if the relevant vocabulary for that concept is not present,as supported by research on numerical concepts.

Question 43

Phonemic awareness is an early reading skill and is a crucial part of the reading process.

Question 44

Many school-aged children do not have well-developed phonemic awareness skills.Discuss how 'phonics' methods attempt to improve the reading skills of students.Does research evidence support their efficacy?

Question 45

The 'Whorfian hypothesis' suggests that the way we think about the world determines the way we use language.

Question 46

Parents who speak a language other than English in the home are often concerned about the influence of the second language on their development of English.What suggestions can be made from research evidence to parents in such a situation to promote positive language development in their children?

Question 47

One factor that is thought to affect the development of reading comprehension is the capacity of an individual's knowledge.

Question 48

Compare and contrast the nativist approach to other approaches of language development.

Question 49

At the logographic stage of reading,children begin to learn the rules that govern how letters and letter combinations can be translated into the more familiar units of spoken language.

Question 50

Young children may take conversational turns,but often focus on different themes and topics.

Question 51

Identify and discuss three areas of the brain that are important for language development.

Question 52

Language development continues into adolescence,even though the basic elements have been mastered by approximately six years of age.

Question 53

Jokes and puns begin to be appreciated during primary school years as they gain a better understanding of the potential ambiguities of words and sentences.