Deck 5: Learning the Structure of Sentences

Question 1

Which statement is a telegraphic expression that your 2-year-old brother might produce to convey "Pablo has eaten all of the candy."

A) Pablo ate all the candy.
B) Pablo eat candy.
C) No more candy.
D) Caddy pweese.

Answer 1

B

Question 2

Refer to the table.
Brown's table demonstrates that a child of the age of

A) 2 would be likely to say "Daddy's Coat."
B) 3 would be likely to say "I eated the apple."
C) 3 would be likely to say "Mommy gave books."
D) 2-and-a-half would be likely to say "Mommy fixed toys."

Answer 2

C

Question 3

Refer to the table.
A child between 2 and 3 years of age would probably be able to produce which of the following utterances?

A) He fell down.
B) Apple in.
C) She's smiling.
D) This is my dog.

Answer 3

B

Question 4

_______ illustrates a compositional relationship between words whereas _______ is an example of a non-compositional compound.

A) Basketball; field mouse
B) Stonewall; wide-mouth bass
C) Game face; stun gun
D) Hot bath; parkway

Question 5

Refer to this sentence: Now you can enjoy a gourmet meal in your sweatpants.
What is the prepositional phrase in the sentence?

A) a gourmet meal
B) now you can enjoy
C) in your sweatpants
D) your sweatpants

Question 6

Refer to this sentence: Now you can enjoy a gourmet meal in your sweatpants. Which of the following represent a noun phrase in the sentence?

A) in your sweatpants
B) can enjoy
C) sweat pants
D) a gourmet meal

Question 7

A major benefit of constituents is that they

A) retain their original meaning, even if they are moved around in a sentence.
B) retain their original meaning even if their components are rearranged.
C) make it unnecessary to apply rules about sentence structure.
D) all contain the same internal structure.

Question 8

The structure of a musical piece is similar to the grammatical structure of a sentence in that

A) notes are like letters, and if they are out of order, it is difficult to interpret the music.
B) musical phrases are much like grammatical constituents, in which individual notes are grouped together into cohesive units.
C) its rhythm determines the grammatical structure of a musical phrase, just as the rhythm of a sentence determines its meaning.
D) they both must be played in their entirety.

Question 9

Consider this sentence: The girl with a tattoo loves me. What is the grammatical structure of this sentence?

A) [_NP The girl] [_PP with a tattoo] [_VP loves me]
B) [_NP The girl [_PP with a tattoo]] [_VP loves me]
C) [_PP The girl with] [_NP a tattoo] [_VP loves me]
D) [_VP [_NP The girl] [_PP with a tattoo] loves]] [_NP me]

Question 10

The idea that language is generative means that

A) the rules of syntax can be used to create novel ways of expressing ideas.
B) words can be combined in any order to create novel ways of expressing ideas.
C) words can be "borrowed" from other languages to create new ways of expressing ideas.
D) sentences can be directly translated from one language to another.

Question 11

The principles and parameters theory suggests that children have the ability to learn any language because

A) they are born with innate expectations that constrain their learning of grammar.
B) of the adaptive nature of human cognition.
C) the linguistic input from ordinary interactions with fluent speakers provides enough data to form syntactic heuristics.
D) the bottom-up nature of language acquisition allows children to learn useful generalizations and categorize words as they develop.

Question 12

According to researcher Dan Everett, the Pirahã people of the Amazon lack

A) universal grammar.
B) syntax.
C) recursion.
D) constituents.

Question 13

The primary difference between rule-based and constructionist accounts is whether

A) lexical items and combinatorial procedures are strictly separate (rule-based) or are constructed with mutual information and interactive (constructionist).
B) lexical items and combinatorial procedures are strictly separate (constructionist) or are constructed with mutual information and interactive (rule-based).
C) syntactic constructions are templates corresponding to meaning, or corresponding to structure.
D) lexical items are constructed first then guided by syntax, or syntax guides lexical selection.

Question 14

The semantic bootstrapping hypothesis asserts that

A) language contains all of the necessary cues and data that children need to develop an understanding of grammatical rules.
B) children have an innate understanding that there are different parts of speech to express different categories of concepts.
C) children do not have innate linguistic abilities, they learn only from modeling by their parents and caretakers.
D) grammatical rules are bootstrapped to situations in which language is used, and this connection allows children to categorize words they hear.

Question 15

Lexical co-occurrence refers to

A) a type of distributional evidence involving patterns of words that are frequently found together.
B) an aspect of universal grammar that causes children to expect that their language has both verbs and nouns.
C) the fact that the same words in the same order can sometimes have more than one meaning.
D) the embedding of a constituent, such a noun phrase, within another constituent of the same type.

Question 16

Mintz's 2003 study found that information present in trigrams such as

A) ball ____ round helps toddlers identify objects in their environment.
B) the soft ____ helps toddlers identify constituents.
C) the ____ is helps toddlers identify syntactic categories.
D) Billy look ____ helps parents to get their toddler's attention.

Question 17

Lexical co-occurrence patterns would not help children

A) recognize the semantic relationships between words, for example that frog and toad are similar animals.
B) learn about syntactic organization, for example that a subject generally precedes a verb.
C) recognize which words are more likely to appear together in particular constituents and phrases, for example "a _______" is likely to include a noun in the blank rather than a verb.
D) recognize that words with similar phonetic patterns tend to belong to the same category, for example that plane and plate are both nouns.

Question 18

Weisleder & Waxman (2010) found that frequent frames were

A) consistently informative between English and Spanish.
B) informative of grammatical category, but slightly more reliable in English.
C) informative of grammatical category, but slightly more reliable in Spanish.
D) not an informative cue for grammatical category.

Question 19

Which sentence below contains an intransitive verb?

A) She boiled the water.
B) The stone rolled.
C) The mother cradled her child.
D) She grew the corn.

Question 20

You can say John threw the stone but you cannot say The stone threw. Our understanding that the second sentence is not legal derives from our experience with

A) the subject-relative clause.
B) subcategorization information.
C) lexical co-occurrence.
D) particles.

Question 21

Six-year-old Rohan participated in a new study, designed to be similar to the Wonnacott 2011 study. An artificial grammar was invented in which roi and des were both particles that followed animal words. During the learning phase, only roi appeared after the word elephant in a sentence. What will Rohan likely conclude?

A) The word elephant should only ever be followed by roi.
B) Either roi or des can legally follow the word elephant.
C) Roi can also follow other animal words, such as cat, mouse, or pig.
D) Roi should follow the word elephant, but des should follow other animal words.

Question 22

Imagine a 3-year-old is presented with a novel word in this passive sentence: The dog is being chased by the cat. If he were then asked what the cat is doing, he would be _______ when answering the question.

A) equally likely to use the passive voice as the active voice
B) more likely to use the wrong form of the verb
C) more likely to use the passive voice than the active
D) more likely to use the active voice than the passive

Question 23

What advice would you give parents who would like to help their young children learn how specific verbs can be used in sentences?

A) Speak to your children using sentence structures where individual verbs are embedded in very similar forms for each respective verb, so they learn to associate a specific verb form with a specific phrase.
B) Speak to your children using sentence structures where individual verbs are embedded in very different forms for each respective verb, so they learn to associate verb forms with diverse phrases and uses.
C) Present children with cue cards that represent various forms of the verbs, and recite those forms several times per day.
D) Parents do not need to make any special effort as it does not help children in their use of specific verb forms because those abilities are innate.

Question 24

The concept of linguistic performance is exemplified by a child that

A) generates the correct form of fly, when asked to describe what a bird had done.
B) recognizes that flew fits better than flown into the sentence The bird ____ high.
C) looks longer in the direction of a sentence containing the wrong grammatical form of a verb than one that uses the correct form.
D) looks longer in the direction of fluent speech than disfluent speech that contains disruptions.

Question 25

The term _______ is used to describe syntactic frames for verbs that specify whether and how they can occur with nouns and the role of those nouns when paired with specific verbs.

A) wh- island constraints
B) semantic bootstrapping
C) transitive verbs
D) verb islands

Question 26

Consider this sentence: The turtle that Tommy got from Hiroki for Christmas has a cold.
What information is conveyed by the relative clause?

A) The turtle has a cold.
B) Hiroki had a turtle.
C) Hiroki gave Tommy a sick turtle.
D) Tommy got a turtle from Hiroki.

Question 27

Consider this sentence: The turtle that Tommy got from Hiroki for Christmas has a cold. What information does the long-distance dependency convey?

A) The turtle has a cold.
B) Hiroki got a turtle from Tommy.
C) Hiroki had a turtle.
D) Tommy got a turtle.

Question 28

Consider this sentence: The drink that is on the floor that is about to spill does contain coffee. What is the auxiliary verb this sentence?

A) to spill
B) is on
C) does
D) is about

Question 29

Swahili and Spanish, in which syntactic information is expressed via multiple affixes bound to words, are _______ languages.

A) associationist
B) connectionist
C) agglutinative
D) transitive

Question 30

Using the connectionist model would be least appropriate to account for

A) distributional evidence.
B) lexical co-occurrence patterns.
C) subcategorization information.
D) long-distance dependencies.

Question 31

_______ suggest(s) that language stimuli does not contain enough information for children to acquire certain language structures and that some innate capacities must exist to help children extract important statistical information from the ambient language.

A) Wh- island constraints
B) Associationist theories
C) Arguments from the poverty of the stimulus
D) Distributional evidence

Question 32

If 9-month-old Hakim heard examples of fluent speech and disfluent speech, as in Soderstrom and Morgan's 2007 study, he would spend

A) equal time looking toward fluent speech and speech containing disfluencies.
B) more time looking toward fluent than non-fluent speech.
C) more time looking toward disfluent speech than fluent speech.
D) more time looking at a speaker where fluent speech is paired with a flashing light.

Question 33

Define and relate semantics and syntax. Provide an example of how changing the syntax can change the meaning of a sentence.

Question 34

Providing relevant examples, outline at least one argument to support the claim that sentence structure is hierarchical, that is, it involves the grouping of words into constituents rather than simply representing sentences as linear strings of words.

Question 35

For the sentence below, propose a grammatical structure using bracket notation (or a tree) to represent the syntactic constituents and their parts. Be sure to show the hierarchical structure of the sentence and label the syntactic category of each word and constituent.
She bought a house with a yard.

Question 36

Explain how language is generative, and provide an example.

Question 37

What is a trigram? What did Mintz (2003) find about parents' use of the "frequent frames" contained in child-directed speech? How might these trigrams help children determine the categories to which words belong?

Question 38

Refer to the figure.
Describe the methods used by Mintz in his 2006 study. What did his findings demonstrate about the effects of distributional evidence on children's word category formation?

Question 39

Give an example of the kind of syntactic overgeneralization that might be produced by a 3- or 4-year-old child. What do such overgeneralizations suggest about children's learning of syntax?

Question 40

Describe what Brauer and colleagues (2011) were able to conclude about the development of grammar processing from their study using fMRI and dMRI images of adult and 7-year-old brains.

Question 41

Explain why the following sentence would not likely be produced by a child with specific language impairment (SLI): The bear that was hiding under the tree ran away. What could a child with SLI communicate about the bear?

Question 42

Consider the following sentences and their corresponding yes/no questions:
The woman who is winning the race is blind./ Is the woman who is winning the race blind?
The woman is comforting the child who is crying./ Is the woman comforting the child who is crying?
-What challenge do questions like these pose for children's acquisition of yes/no questions? What do their typical learning patterns suggest about the learning process?

Question 43

Do Bayesian models originate from the nativist or the data-driven perspective of language acquisition? Explain your answer.

Question 44

Method 6.2 explains some of the questions we can start asking by using computer simulations of language learning. Which principles or theories do you believe could be tested using a computer simulation and why?

Question 45

Explain the difference between linguistic input and linguistic intake. How might this difference influence a child's language development?