Deck 4: Language Development

Question 1

Placing more emphasis on the context and content of children´s utterances, rather than just on their form, is known as:

A)Structural priming
B)Rich interpretation
C)Categorical perception
D)Fast-mapping
E)Unstructured priming

Answer 1

B

Question 2

Which of the following conveys the idea of a child acquiring simple words by a parent pointing at a dog and saying "dog," and the child then simply attaching the name to the object?

A)Ostensive modeling
B)Computational modeling
C)Connectionist modeling
D)Distributional modeling
E)Prototype modeling

Answer 2

A

Question 3

Children use semantic information about which sorts of verbs can and cannot participate in certain verb-argument structures. For example, verbs that convey information about motion in a specified direction can only occur in intransitive constructions. This idea is called the:

A)Social interaction theory
B)Semantic verb class hypothesis
C)Contrastive hypothesis
D)Formal learning theory
E)Lexical verb class hypothesis

Answer 3

B

Question 4

When a child uses a word in a broader way than the adult usage (e.g., the word ball is used for apples, grapes, eggs, anything round), which of the following occurs?

A)Under-extension
B)Mapping constraint
C)Un-rich interpretation
D)Segmentation error
E)Over-extension

Question 5

The stage of single-word speech production is known as the ______________ stage.

A)Holophrastic
B)Telegraphic
C)Babbling
D)Vocal play
E)Grammatical

Question 6

Correcting children´s grammatical errors makes:

A)The biggest difference to their speech patterns
B)Little difference to their speech patterns
C)No difference to their speech patterns
D)A substantial difference to their speech patterns
E)Close to the biggest difference to their speech patterns

Question 7

The pragmatic principle that simply says that different words have different meanings is the:

A)Late-syntax theory
B)Contrastive hypothesis
C)Prototype hypothesis
D)Verb-island hypothesis
E)Semantic-connectionist hypothesis

Question 8

Simplified languages that were created for communication between speakers of different languages that were forced into prolonged contact are called:

A)Pidgins
B)Idioms
C)Dialects
D)Prosody
E)Argots

Question 9

Early multi-word speech that consists primarily of content words, with many of the function words absent, is commonly said to be:

A)Telegraphic
B)Holophrastic
C)Bootstrapping
D)Pivotal speech
E)Rich speech

Question 10

Children learn a general rule, but apply it incorrectly by using it in all instances. Their performance starts at a good level, but then becomes worse, before improving again; a process called:

A)M-shaped development
B)N-shaped development
C)S-shaped development
D)U-shaped development
E)J-shaped development

Question 11

Who argued that we are born with a fixed set of switches (parameters), the positions of which are set by exposure to particular languages?

A)Chomsky
B)Piaget
C)Skinner
D)Braine
E)Pinker

Question 12

For all the child knows, it could be that the word "dog" is supposed to pick out just the dog´s feet, or the whole category of animals, or its color, smell, or the way it is moving, and so on. This is best known as:

A)An over-regularization error
B)The mapping problem
C)A segmentation error
D)Taxonomic constraint
E)Phonological constraint

Question 13

By the age of 18-24 months, the child has a vocabulary of about:

A)30 words
B)100 words
C)75 words
D)50 words
E)20 words

Question 14

Who argued that language was acquired by the same mechanisms of conditioning and reinforcement that were thought at the time to govern all other aspects of animal and human behavior?

A)Chomsky
B)Hume
C)Skinner
D)Braine
E)Piaget

Question 15

We do not segment speech so that a word begins with a sequence like "mp" because this is not a legitimate string of sounds at the start of English words. The type of information that concerns the way in which sounds co-occur in a language is called:

A)Prosodic
B)Semantic
C)Pragmatic
D)Distributional
E)Referential

Question 16

If adults hear a particular syntactic structure, they are more likely to use that structure in production in the immediate future; a phenomenon known as:

A)Fast-mapping
B)Structural mapping
C)Bootstrapping
D)Categorical perception
E)Structural priming

Question 17

Which of the following hypotheses states that mothers in some way tailor the amount of simplification they provide, depending on how much the child appears to need?

A)Continuity
B)Language bioprogram
C)Linguistic feedback
D)Discontinuity
E)Semantic feature

Question 18

Children do not start speaking at birth because:

A)They do not start learning language before birth
B)They need some exposure to language before they can start using it, and because other processes have to reach some level of ability first
C)The mother´s womb provides shelter, excluding all stimuli from the outside world
D)There is not enough information for the baby to be able to learn from the sounds heard in the womb
E)Amniotic fluid prevents all frequencies from reaching the baby

Question 19

If a child hears the word "cat" in the presence of a cat, he or she will assume that all similar things will also be called "cat." This is a result of which of the following constraints?

A)Mutual-exclusivity assumption
B)Taxonomic
C)Whole-object assumption
D)Segmentation
E)Mapping

Question 20

Which of the following approaches demonstrates that knowledge about categories can be acquired on a statistical basis alone, and syntactic categories can be acquired without explicit knowledge of syntactic rules or semantic information?

A)Rationalist modeling
B)Prototype modeling
C)Ostensive modeling
D)Computational modeling
E)Connectionist modeling