Deck 18: Communication, Language and Literacy

Question 1

Which is the most accurate description of habituation in an infant?

A) Repeatedly producing the same behaviour to a stimulus.
B) A response that decreases because the relevant stimulus is presented repeatedly.
C) Behaviours that occur repeatedly such as sucking.
D) Continuing to produce the same behaviour because it has been learnt.

Answer 1

A response that decreases because the relevant stimulus is presented repeatedly.

Question 2

Which of the following is NOT correct?

A) The smallest unit of sound that can be identified in speech is a phoneme.
B) Phonemes are perceived as categorical stimuli by adults.
C) Infants lose their ability to make distinctions between phonemes.
D) Infants cannot distinguish between phonemes at birth.

Answer 2

Infants cannot distinguish between phonemes at birth.

Question 3

At around what age do infants start to produce utterances containing two words?

A) 10-12 months
B) 14-16 months
C) 18-20 months
D) 20-22 months

Answer 3

18-20 months

Question 4

The speech in twins is sometimes delayed and this appears to be due to:

A) sharing biological resources in the womb.
B) the older twin getting more attention.
C) fewer episodes of joint attention.
D) spending more time with each other.

Question 5

Which of the following statements is correct?

A) Most animals can use language.
B) Communication and language are the same.
C) At 12 months infants can use language.
D) Language involves structural dependency.

Question 6

Which of the following statements would Chomsky be most likely to disagree with?

A) Linguistic rules enable an infinite number of utterances to be produced.
B) Children are not reinforced for producing grammatically correct utterances.
C) Only with an innate set of abilities is it possible to acquire language.
D) Simplification of mother's speech helps language acquisition.

Question 7

Which set of letters is NOT associated with Chomsky?

A) CDS
B) GB
C) LAD
D) PPT

Question 8

Which of the following findings have NOT been used to support Chomsky's claims?

A) Deaf children can spontaneously develop sign language.
B) Children are partly responsible for the development of Creole languages.
C) Blind children acquire language at a similar age to sighted children.
D) Adults help children to acquire language by providing correct examples after a child's grammatical mistake.

Question 9

Which of the following statements about the simplification of speech to children (CDS) is incorrect?

A) Experiments show that CDS is not helpful to language acquisition.
B) There are mixed findings about the relation between CDS and language acquisition.
C) The speech to some children contains very few of the usual characteristics of CDS.
D) Mothers of deaf children modify their sign language to children in similar ways to CDS.

Question 10

Which one of the following findings was reported by Brown and Hanlon (1970)?

A) Children are not corrected for mistakes about meaning.
B) Children usually hear the correct version of a sentence after they make a grammatical mistake.
C) Children are not given feedback about grammatical mistakes.
D) Children are given simplified speech (CDS).

Question 11

A constructivist view of language acquisition supposes that:

A) Piaget was correct in his description of language acquisition.
B) innate abilities are largely responsible for language acquisition.
C) children use one word, then two words and then sentences.
D) the grammar of children's early speech reflects the grammar of the speech they hear.

Question 12

Which of the following statements is incorrect?

A) Backpropagation occurs in connectionist models.
B) Learning does not occur in connectionist modelling.
C) Connectionist models usually receive feedback about errors.
D) Connectionist models can be directly related to what happens in the brain.

Question 13

Which of the following statements is not true?

A) Phonological abilities in pre-school are related to early progress in reading.
B) Phonological abilities seem to be affected by reading ability.
C) Chinese readers often have poor phonological abilities.
D) Children with dyslexia have poor phonological abilities.

Question 14

Which of the following claims about SLI (specific language impairment) is most likely to be incorrect?

A) SLI is the result of a general cognitive difficulty.
B) SLI is the result of difficulties with identifying relevant sounds in speech.
C) Children with SLI have very similar language difficulties.
D) About 5 per cent of children have SLI.

Question 15

Which of the following is NOT a stage identified by Frith in her description of the development of reading?

A) Logographic
B) Orthographic.
C) Graphemic
D) Alphabetic.

Question 16

All the following people, except one, are well known for their work on reading. Which person is not known for their work on reading?

A) Bryant
B) Tomasello
C) Goswami
D) Plaut

Question 17

Which of the following is the best description or statement about an opaque language?

A) Identification of individual sounds is difficult.
B) It is common to have pictograms.
C) Phonemes can easily be predicted from a grapheme.
D) Phonemes are difficult to predict from graphemes.

Question 18

Which of the following is the best operational definition of phonological awareness?

A) Being able to identify that two words begin with the same sound.
B) Being able to explain why two words sound the same.
C) Being able to recite the letters of the alphabet.
D) Being able to speak clearly.

Question 19

Which of the following statements is NOT true about poor comprehenders?

A) Poor comprehenders are as good as other children of the same age at reading a book aloud.
B) The phonological awareness of poor comprehenders is similar to that of other children of the same age.
C) Poor comprehenders do as well on semantic tasks as typical children of the same age.
D) Poor comprehenders have been studied by Nation, Snowling and their colleagues.