Deck 9: Section 4: Language and Thought

Question 1

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

Answer 1

True

Question 2

Morphological rules and syntactical rules are part of grammar.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Written language originated approximately 1 million years ago.

Answer 3

False

Question 4

The surface structure of a sentence is more likely to be remembered than its deep structure.

Question 5

Language is a set of rules that specify how the units of grammar are combined to produce meaningful messages.

Question 6

Deep structure refers to the meaning of a sentence.

Question 7

It is possible for a sentence to obey grammatical and syntactical rules but be devoid of semantics.

Question 8

The sentence "The childs runned through the house" suffers from a lack of semantics.

Question 9

The word "when" is a function morpheme.

Question 10

Between the ages of 1 and 5, children learn, on average, 15-20 words every day.

Question 11

Approximately one-third of the morphemes used in human language are function morphemes.

Question 12

Today there are about 4,000 human languages.

Question 13

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

Question 14

A simple syntactical rule in the English language is "i before e except after c."

Question 15

Accents occur when morphological rules are violated.

Question 16

Human references to intangible things, such as "justice," function analogously to alarm calls in other species.

Question 17

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language.

Question 18

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

Question 19

Human language may have evolved from signaling systems similar to those observed in other species.

Question 20

The average 1-year-old has a vocabulary of 10 words.

Question 21

Noam Chomsky provided a behaviorist explanation of language development.

Question 22

The behaviorist explanation of language acquisition has received substantial empirical and theoretical support.

Question 23

At every stage of language development, humans speak better than they understand what is spoken to them.

Question 24

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

Question 25

Fast mapping occurs when children associate a word with its underlying concept after a single exposure to that word.

Question 26

The telegraphic speech of a 2-year-old child usually is not grammatical.

Question 27

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

Question 28

Infants begin to babble speech sounds between 1 and 3 months of age.

Question 29

Human infants can distinguish among all of the contrasting sounds that occur in all human languages.

Question 30

The phrase "over and back" is a good example of telegraphic speech.

Question 31

Toddlers usually learn nouns before they learn verbs.

Question 32

Parents spend little time teaching grammar to their children.

Question 33

Because they are older when they begin to learn English, Chinese preschoolers adopted into American families begin to use English content and function morphemes at around the same time as preschoolers who are not adopted.

Question 34

Babies typically start speaking in single words by 5 months of age.

Question 35

Deaf babies will not begin to babble until they are taught an alternative means of communication, such as American Sign Language.

Question 36

Explicit awareness of grammatical rules is not required in order for speakers of a language to speak grammatically.

Question 37

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

Question 38

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

Question 39

Grammatical mistakes in children most often arise from not applying a previously learned rule to a novel sentence construction.

Question 40

Behaviorist explanations of language development emphasize how language is acquired through shaping and reinforcement.

Question 41

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

Question 42

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

Question 43

People with Wernicke's aphasia have difficulty producing grammatically correct speech.

Question 44

People with Broca's aphasia primarily have difficulty understanding language.

Question 45

Interactionist theories of language development argue that social interactions, not innate biological processes, are responsible for the development of language.

Question 46

Apes who have acquired the use of human language can process the meaning of grammatically complex sentences.

Question 47

The best time to acquire a second language is right after puberty, when learning skills and concentration have developed but the brain is still fairly plastic.

Question 48

Bilingual children tend to have a smaller vocabulary in each language than their monolingual peers.

Question 49

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

Question 50

Learning a second language during childhood broadly impairs cognitive development.

Question 51

While they are speaking, people with Wernicke's aphasia appear not to suffer from any language deficits.

Question 52

The linguistic relativity hypothesis states that language shapes the nature of thought.

Question 53

Wernicke's area is located in the left temporal cortex of the brain.

Question 54

Noam Chomsky is an advocate of the nativist theory of language development.

Question 55

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

Question 56

A language acquisition device (LAD) is something that is acquired through experience.

Question 57

Apes who have acquired the use of human language usually can construct complex, grammatically correct sentences.

Question 58

B. F. Skinner believed that all humans are born with an LAD (Leaning Acquisition Device).

Question 59

Bilinguals have increased gray matter density in the prefrontal cortex relative to monolinguals.

Question 60

Apes who have acquired the use of American Sign Language speak at the level of a 4-year-old child.

Question 61

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

Question 62

Eleanor Rosch developed both family resemblance theory and prototype theory.

Question 63

The brain appears to be hardwired such that certain areas of the brain respond more strongly to some categories than others.

Question 64

People who are blind from birth show category-specific deficits for objects that are categorized in the visual cortex.

Question 65

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

Question 66

The best, or most typical, member of a category is called an exemplar.

Question 67

English speakers shown a timeline on a horizontal display make faster time judgments than those shown a timeline on a vertical display.

Question 68

Meeting a sufficient condition for membership into a club guarantees club membership.

Question 69

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

Question 70

fMRI studies have revealed that visual processing is an important component of exemplar-based learning.

Question 71

The left brain hemisphere is primarily involved in forming prototypes, and the right brain hemisphere is mainly active in recognizing exemplars.

Question 72

Recent research suggests that language affects the way we process colors.

Question 73

Among Americans, the prototypical bird is the bald eagle.

Question 74

The more characteristics an object shares with a prototype, the more likely it will be excluded from a category that already contains a prototype.

Question 75

If someone cannot identify a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver, that person also probably will have difficulty identifying different fruits and vegetables.

Question 76

Both prototypes and exemplars are used when forming categories and concepts.

Question 77

Today, most cognitive psychologists believe that language and thought are largely synonymous.

Question 78

If language capacity is significantly impaired, other higher-executive cognitions necessarily will be impaired.

Question 79

The most common way of forming categories is by specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership.

Question 80

Family resemblance theory is useful for categorizing people as belonging to the same or different families, but it contributes little to our understanding of other categories.