Deck 8: Language and Communication

Question 1

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Autism

Answer 1

A syndrome characterized by disordered social interactions and problems with language and communication.

Question 2

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

Answer 2

A cluster of five related syndromes that vary in terms of language skill deficits, children's IQ, and the appearance and course of symptoms.

Question 3

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Babbling

Answer 3

Patterned but meaningless sequences of reduplicated sounds, such as strings of syllables.

Question 4

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Constrained statistical learning

Question 5

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Emergentist Coalition Model (ECM)

Question 6

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Grammar

Question 7

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Holophrase

Question 8

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Infant-directed (ID) speech

Question 9

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Lexical contrast

Question 10

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Mean length of utterance (MLU)

Question 11

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Morphemes

Question 12

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Mutual exclusivity assumption

Question 13

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Overextension

Question 14

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Overregularization

Question 15

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Perceptual magnet effect

Question 16

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Phonemes

Question 17

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Phonetics

Question 18

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Phonology

Question 19

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Pragmatics

Question 20

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Referential cues

Question 21

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Semantics

Question 22

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Syllables

Question 23

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Taxonomic assumption

Question 24

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Telegraphic speech

Question 25

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Underextension

Question 26

What is the definition of the following terms?
-Whole object assumption

Question 27

The system of language that corresponds to the meaning of words is

A) phonology
B) semantics
C) grammar
D) pragmatics

Question 28

All of the following points support nativist views about language acquisition except

A) children learn the language that is spoken around them
B) rate of acquisition varies across children, but there is a similar order for the acquisition of grammar
C) children are able to apply rules of grammar to words they have never heard before
D) deaf children reared without exposure to formal sign language invent their own rule-governed gestural systems of communication

Question 29

Andrew's mother brings him to a university laboratory to participate in a study of language acquisition but is surprised that the researchers play recordings of nonsense sentences, comprised of invented words such as boga, giku, kuga, and gapi. Andrew is most likely participating in a study designed to

A) minimize interference from parents during the procedure
B) test his ability to learn to recognize different kinds of recurring patterns
C) determine how much language input he has received so far
D) see whether he will imitate these speech sounds

Question 30

Researchers have documented the existence of a widely used form of language that is characterized by emotional, short, repetitive, high-pitched, simplified utterances. This form of language is referred to as

A) adult-directed speech
B) egocentric speech
C) infant-directed speech
D) nonstandard speech

Question 31

In all spoken languages, there are variations of sound that function as speech units and signal differences in words through combinations of vowels and consonants. These are called

A) syllables
B) vocal contrasts
C) feature indicators
D) phonemes

Question 32

All of the following statements about infant-directed (ID) speech are supported by research except

A) infants prefer ID speech over adult-directed speech, even if it is presented in a language that they have not previously heard
B) infants' preference for ID speech is limited to spoken language, unless they and their parents are both deaf and have been communicating only with sign language
C) ID speech may function like a set of introductory language lessons for young infants by exaggerating categorical differences between speech sounds
D) infants' preference for ID speech may reflect the fact that it focuses on emotional communication more than AD speech does

Question 33

All of the following statements about early language abilities are accurate except

A) at 6 months of age, infants are able to discriminate native and nonnative consonant contrasts
B) by 10 to 12 months of age, infants have difficulty perceiving differences among nonnative consonant contrasts
C) after infants become specialists for the sounds in their native language, they are unable to regain that ability for any other language - an example of the "use it or lose it" principle
D) a "perceptual magnet effect" is now believed to provide the best explanation of infants' shifting phonemic sensitivity

Question 34

If Henry is a normally developing 9-month-old, he most likely

A) has already produced his first recognizable word
B) spends a lot of his time awake babbling meaningless sequences such as bababa and mamama
C) is still only cooing and vocalizing randomly and infrequently
D) has not reached the stage of gestural communication

Question 35

Charlotte's parents want to facilitate their 12-month-old daughter's ability to communicate with them. They can do this, at least in the short term, by

A) using adult-directed speech whenever they speak to her
B) discouraging her from using gestural communication, since it may interfere with the development of spoken language
C) speaking to her less often
D) accompanying their spoken words with symbolic gestures that they use consistently

Question 36

A one-word utterance that is used to communicate any of a range of meanings is referred to as

A) a holophrase
B) a syntactic unit
C) telegraphic speech
D) egocentric speech

Question 37

Compared with children from higher-income households, children from lower-income families

A) tend to have slower vocabulary development as toddlers but catch up by the time they enter kindergarten
B) often have larger vocabularies until they start school
C) tend to have fewer words per hour directed to them
D) experience similar amounts and types of language input during interactions with parents

Question 38

Efforts to generalize about children's first spoken words have shown that

A) there is little variation across different children
B) regardless of the language, nouns appear before verbs
C) across cultures, parents differ in the words and phrases that they encourage their children to learn first
D) bilingual children usually acquire nouns in one language and verbs in their second language

Question 39

Which of the following language milestones typically occurs first?

A) telegraphic speech
B) one-word utterances
C) using "-ed" to form the past tense of regular verbs in English
D) gestural communication

Question 40

Which theory of early word learning asserts that infants learn language easily because they are guided by a set of assumptions about the possible meanings of new words?

A) mutual attention
B) constraints/principles
C) social/pragmatic
D) grammatical cues

Question 41

Two-year-old Jeremy is participating in a study in which the researcher said that she was looking for a "crug". She then pulled an object out of a paper bag, looked happy, and said, "Ah!" Later, when a different researcher asked Jeremy the name of the object, he told her that it was a "crug." This is an example of young children's ability to use

A) grammatical cues
B) the whole-object assumption
C) referential cues
D) imitation

Question 42

Which of the following is an example of how contrasting semantic relations might help young children learn new words?

A) A teacher says, "I want everyone to wear dungarees tomorrow."
B) An older siblings says, "We want milk and cookies."
C) A researcher says, "Where is a ZAV?"
D) A parent says, "Bring me the chartreuse scarf, not the blue one."

Question 43

To track children's grammatical development, language researchers use a measure based on the number of morphemes in children's speech. This measure is known as the

A) mean length of utterance (MLU)
B) multilingual unit (MU)
C) grammatical lexicon count (GLC)
D) fundamental length metric (FLM)

Question 44

Studies of morpheme acquisition have shown all of the following except

A) children acquire morphemes, such as -s, 's, and -ed, in essentially the same order, although the rate of acquisition may vary
B) morphemes that are acquired first are phonologically easier than morphemes that are acquired later
C) the frequency with which morphemes are used in adult speech does not predict the ease with which children acquire those morphemes
D) the order in which morphemes are acquired is a function of how semantically and grammatically complex they are

Question 45

The classic "wug test" was developed to determine whether young children are able to

A) imitate a nonsense word
B) use rules of grammar to modify nonsense words
C) suggest real words that rhyme with nonsense words
D) avoid overextending words in nonsensical contexts

Question 46

Studies of overregularization - the phenomenon in which children say "mouses" or falled" instead of "mice" or "fell" -- indicate that

A) children make this grammatical error in approximately 25 percent of utterances in which irregular verb forms would be correct
B) overregularization increases from the age of two years to school age
C) the more often parents correctly use an irregular form, the less often children overregularize it
D) young children rely on memory rather than grammatical rules to produce both regular and irregular verb forms

Question 47

All of the following statements about the acquisition of grammar are correct except

A) children's early two-word utterances communicate a range of meanings, such as agent + action ("Daddy eat") and action + object ("Eat cookie")
B) the order of words in children's two-word utterances usually does not vary
C) many children go through a stage in which the combination of words in two-word utterances seems to be random, resulting in a roughly equal number of phrases like "eat cookie" and "cookie eat"
D) even before they are 2 years old, children are able to infer meaning from grammatical markers such as word order

Question 48

Sam has not yet acquired all of the morphemes that are commonly used by speakers of English. As a result, he produces utterances like "mommy sock," "more juice," and "no cookie." These utterances are examples of

A) early language delays
B) underextensions
C) autistic language
D) telegraphic speech

Question 49

One-year-old George, who lives in Turkey, is learning Turkish. Compared to 1-year-olds growing up in the United States and learning English, George most likely will

A) make more grammatical errors because Turkish is a more complex language than English
B) need explicit instructions from his parents and other adults in order to learn the complex Turkish suffixation system
C) have an advantage over children learning English because it is easier to learn the Turkish rule for adding suffixes than it is to learn all of the irregular verb forms that are found in English
D) acquire the grammatical rules for Turkish with very few errors

Question 50

The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI)

A) assesses expressive language but not receptive abilities
B) combines parent reports and checklists with a representative language sample
C) cannot be used with children who are younger than 24 months old
D) has little power for predicting which children will have language delays and which will develop within a normal range

Question 51

All of the following statements about early language delays are accurate except

A) there is compelling evidence of a genetic contribution
B) they are a reliable indicator of the form of autism known as Asperger's Syndrome
C) the majority of 2-year-olds with language delay have normal language abilities by the age of 3 or 4 years
D) nearly all children who have language impairments in later years had some sort of prior language delay

Question 52

All of the following are differences between the infant and toddler forms of the MacArthur CDI except

A) there are more words on the toddler vocabulary checklist than on the infant vocabulary checklist
B) the infant form checks the frequency with which children use gestures to communicate, whereas the toddler form asks parents to list three of the longest sentences their child has said recently
C) the infant form uses parent reports, whereas the toddler form relies on samples of the child's own speech
D) there are more questions about children's pretend play behavior on the infant form than on the toddler form

Question 53

The highest level of cognitive and linguistic functioning is found in which of the autism spectrum disorders?

A) Rett's Syndrome
B) autistic disorder
C) childhood disintegrative disorder
D) Asperger's Syndrome

Question 54

All of the following characteristics are found in the language of children with autism except

A) echolalia, or pronoun reversal
B) an atypical order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes
C) pragmatic deficits
D) unusual patterns of vocal stress or intonation

Question 55

Albert, who has autism, exhibits deficits in language that are also found in many other children with autism. These commonly observed deficits include all of the following except

A) the inability to interpret other people's nonverbal emotional signals
B) an impaired theory of mind
C) the absence of joint attention
D) conversation that is excessive in following rules of politeness and reciprocity

Question 56

Paul, a textbook author reviewing previous studies, finds that researchers using brain imaging techniques to study autism have found evidence for all of the following except

A) the brains of children with autism process social stimuli differently than the brains of comparison children without autism
B) brain activity in children without autism changes in response to certain characteristics of speech samples, but brain activity in children with autism does not change in response to the same samples
C) deficits in theory of mind are the underlying cause of autism
D) children with autism show a preference for nonspeech signals rather than speech samples - the opposite of the pattern that is usually found in children without autism