Deck 11: Language

Question 1

A person with conduction aphasia is most likely to have difficulty in

A)comprehending spoken language.
B)speaking fluently.
C)repeating spoken language.
D)understanding function words like "if" or "but."

Answer 1

C

Question 2

You encounter an aphasic patient with language deficits resulting from brain injury. You are also likely to also observe hemiparesis on the ________ side of the body, which would indicate that the ________ hemisphere is especially critical to language function.

A)left; left
B)left; right
C)right; left
D)right; right

Answer 2

C

Question 3

The language-relevant regions of the right hemisphere would be most critical to understanding which of the following?

A)a complicated sentence
B)sarcasm
C)someone speaking quickly
D)a foreign language

Answer 3

B

Question 4

The left perisylvian network of language includes which areas?

A)Broca's area
B)Wernicke's area
C)both Broca's area and Wernicke's area
D)neither Broca's area nor Wernicke's area

Question 5

Patient "Tan," studied by the neurologist Broca, had great difficulty in generating spontaneous speech and was unable to utter any word other than the nonsense syllable "tan." Postmortem autopsy of Tan's brain revealed

A)abnormal EEG signals from the left frontal operculum.
B)a lesion in the left inferior frontal cortex.
C)cerebral hemorrhage in the right inferior frontal lobes.
D)demyelination in a region of the left anterior frontal lobes.

Question 6

Which of the following, if true, would be most helpful toward advancing our understanding of the anatomy of language?

A)if mice had a sophisticated spoken language
B)if language was not so heavily left-lateralized
C)if more subcortical structures were involved in language processing
D)if there were not so many different languages in existence

Question 7

Which of the following brain structures is NOT directly involved in language?

A)Sylvian fissure
B)angular gyrus
C)inferior parietal lobule
D)inferior frontal cortex

Question 8

People with Broca's aphasia may have subtle deficits in their ability to comprehend language based on its grammatical structure. This symptom is called

A)aphemia.
B)alexia.
C)agrammatism.
D)semantic dementia.

Question 9

The term ________ refers to the collective store of information about the semantics, syntax, orthography, and phonology of words.

A)word form
B)acquired dyslexia
C)mental lexicon
D)prosody

Question 10

Which of the following statements best describes agrammatic aphasics?

A)They are able to process language but not produce it.
B)Their grammar is intact but their word choice is nonsensical.
C)They are unable to use syntax.
D)Their disorder is only one of speech production.

Question 11

A current controversy regarding the usefulness of Broca's aphasia as a diagnostic category focuses on the observation that

A)there is no strict correspondence between lesions of Broca's area and the symptoms classically associated with Broca's aphasia.
B)Broca's aphasia is far too frequently diagnosed and may actually subsume other subtypes of aphasia.
C)Broca's aphasia has been found to occur as a result of right-hemisphere injury just as often as left-hemisphere injury.
D)Broca's aphasia is usually a secondary aphasia rather than a selective deficit.

Question 12

A patient's symptoms include poor spoken and written comprehension but fluent and reasonably grammatical speech output. Which part of this person's brain is most likely damaged?

A)the anterior language areas in the right hemisphere
B)the posterior language areas in the right hemisphere
C)the anterior language areas in the left hemisphere
D)the posterior language areas in the left hemisphere

Question 13

Which of the following sentences would a person with Broca's aphasia be most likely to misunderstand?

A)"The shirt that Michael bought yesterday is too small for him."
B)"The woman whom Richard met yesterday is leaving for Vancouver."
C)"The dog that George petted yesterday bit him and then ran away."
D)People with Broca's aphasia would not be likely to misunderstand any of these sentences because they have only expressive deficits.

Question 14

Which of the following statements does NOT describe agrammatic aphasics?

A)They are unable to process grammar.
B)They rely on overlearned forms of grammar.
C)They are unable to use syntax.
D)They have difficulty with comprehension.

Question 15

The German neurologist Wernicke found that injury to which region of the brain resulted in poor language comprehension and nonsensical but relatively fluent speech?

A)the left arcuate fasciculus
B)the left posterior and superior temporal lobe
C)the right inferior frontal lobe
D)the right medial temporal lobe

Question 16

________ is a general term for deficits in language comprehension and production that occur as the result of brain injury.

A)Alexia
B)Aphasia
C)Agrammatism
D)Anomia

Question 17

A patient's symptoms include poor spoken and written comprehension but fluent and reasonably grammatical speech output. What is the most probable diagnosis?

A)acquired alexia
B)conduction aphasia
C)Wernicke's aphasia
D)Broca's aphasia

Question 18

Recent studies have shown that the lesion associated with persistent severe Wernicke's aphasia may have to include not only Wernicke's area itself, but also

A)Broca's area.
B)the analogous region of cortex in the right hemisphere.
C)the white matter tracts below Wernicke's area.
D)the arcuate fasciculus.

Question 19

The speech of people with Broca's aphasia is usually slow and effortful and consists of primarily concrete words, while words that serve grammatical functions are omitted. This type of speech output is called

A)word salad.
B)telegraphic speech.
C)spectral speech.
D)paraphasic speech.

Question 20

A patient with dysarthria has trouble

A)controlling the muscles that articulate speech sounds.
B)activating word-form representations based on conceptual knowledge.
C)converting knowledge about written characters into their sounds.
D)segmenting speech into separate words.

Question 21

You receive a text message that reads "My steak eaten up by the broccoli." Which word would lead to a P600 for you?

A)steak
B)eaten
C)the
D)broccoli

Question 22

An aphasic person who makes semantic paraphasia errors in her speech might say "________" when she actually intends to say "________."

A)kit; cat
B)am; is
C)cow; horse
D)spin; snip

Question 23

An early ERP component associated with morphosyntactic violations is the

A)LAN.
B)N400.
C)MMN.
D)P600.

Question 24

________ specifically refers to the variations in the pitch of a speaker's voice that convey emotion and emphasis in speech.

A)Phonology
B)Prosody
C)Speech segmentation
D)Orthography

Question 25

________ is to the meaning of a word as ________ is to the spelling of a word.

A)Orthography; phonology
B)Phonology; prosody
C)Prosody; semantics
D)Semantics; orthography

Question 26

Which of the following best describes a case that depends primarily on prosodic aspects of language?

A)The ability to recognize the characteristic rise that occurs at the end of a sentence in a speaker's voice when she asks a question.
B)The ability to discriminate between homophones like "blue" and "blew" when they are used in sentences.
C)The ability to pronounce "head" correctly, even though it is an irregular word.
D)The ability to retrieve the correct name associated with a familiar pictured face.

Question 27

Which of the following is NOT true of infants' speech recognition abilities?

A)At birth infants can distinguish between any phoneme.
B)The babbling of infants becomes more and more like the native language as they age.
C)At 9 months infants are unable to recognize foreign language phonemes.
D)Early babbling has phonemes from all the languages in the world.

Question 28

Which of the following is NOT a property of the Word Bank?

A)It has many phonological neighbors.
B)It has many semantic neighbors.
C)It has more than one pronunciation.
D)It has more than one meaning.

Question 29

Which of the following best describes the three main components of word or lexical processing in the correct order, according to most modular models of word recognition?

A)lexical access → lexical integration → lexical selection
B)lexical access → lexical selection → lexical integration
C)lexical selection → lexical access → lexical integration
D)lexical selection → lexical integration → lexical access

Question 30

You receive a text message that reads "What time do you want to have lunch tomorrow night?" Which word would lead to an N400 for you?

A)time
B)you
C)tomorrow
D)night

Question 31

The symptoms of all of the following neurological language syndromes suggest the disruption of an organized semantic network in which word meanings are stored, EXCEPT

A)Wernicke's aphasia.
B)deep dyslexia.
C)progressive semantic dementia.
D)conduction aphasia.

Question 32

The mental lexicon is thought to be organized as a semantic network in which word meanings are connected to each other, as in the two-dimensional diagram here. Based on what you know about how strength of association between word meanings is represented in semantic networks, determine which of the following statements regarding the network is true.

A)Jackal is a less-frequently accessed animal word than cat.
B)The association between dog and jackal is weaker than the association between cat and jackal.
C)Jackal is a less-frequently accessed animal word than dog.
D)The association between dog and cat is stronger than the association between animal and cat.

Question 33

The P600, also known as the SPS, is an ERP component that is sensitive to the violation of expectations based mostly on

A)the physical appearance of words.
B)the pronunciation of words.
C)semantics.
D)syntax.

Question 34

Language errors in which a person substitutes words that are related in meaning for one another are called

A)lemma confusions.
B)syntactic substitutions.
C)semantic paraphasias.
D)orthographic intrusions.

Question 35

Segmenting the boundaries between words is a particularly difficult computational problem in

A)reading.
B)writing.
C)speech perception.
D)prosody.

Question 36

Which of the following statements regarding the organization of semantic networks is FALSE?

A)The most frequently associated nodes have the largest distances between them in the network.
B)Concepts that have strong associations to each other in meaning have strong connections.
C)If one node is activated, the greatest amount of spreading activation will accrue in its closest neighbors.
D)Spreading activation is greater between nodes that are accessed together frequently than between nodes that are accessed together infrequently.

Question 37

The observation that we can understand the speech of different speakers, regardless of variations in the pitches of the speakers' voices, the speakers' rates of speech, and the speakers' dialects, indicates that

A)the prosodic components of speech have little functional significance in speech comprehension.
B)the recognition of spoken words depends on orthography rather than other aspects of language.
C)speech comprehension involves semantic analysis of words rather than phonological analysis of words.
D)speech recognition cannot rely on the direct matching of specific sounds to language representations in memory.

Question 38

A major issue in the study of word recognition involves the extent to which relatively low-level sensory representations interact with relatively high-level information, such as the context in which a word appears. A modular model of word comprehension would be most likely to argue that

A)there is a great degree of interaction between low-level and high-level representations.
B)processing at each level is independent, and there is little or no interaction between them.
C)certain levels may interact freely, whereas others cannot.
D)the degree to which the levels of word processing interact with each other depends on the type of word being processed.

Question 39

The concept of "words in the same neighborhood" is analogous to which of the following in the semantic domain?

A)words that rhyme
B)words that are spelled similarly
C)words related in meaning
D)None of the answer options is correct.

Question 40

When you are shown the written word "neuroscience" and you read it aloud, you are translating ________ information into ________ information about this word.

A)syntactic; semantic
B)semantic; orthographic
C)orthographic; phonological
D)phonological; syntactic

Question 41

Which of the following, if true, would be damaging to evidence cited to support the hypothesis that spoken language evolved from gestural language?

A)Monkeys actually have a much more sophisticated spoken language than previously thought.
B)Monkeys can be trained to use gestural language, but not spoken language.
C)Monkey brains are organized ipsilaterally with regard to motor control.
D)Monkey brains are incapable of processing sophisticated spoken language.

Question 42

In studies with implanted electrodes, Sahin and colleagues (2009) found that Broca's area processed which elements of language?

A)lexical
B)grammatical
C)phonological
D)All of the answer options are correct.

Question 43

The three primary ways in which words are symbolized in different writing systems are alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic.

Question 44

Which of the following evolutionary anatomical developments from apes to humans seems to have most greatly facilitated humans' capacity for sophisticated spoken language?

A)increased size of left inferior frontal gyrus
B)increased size of left lateral temporal areas
C)increased connectivity within inferior frontal and lateral temporal areas
D)increased connectivity between inferior frontal, lateral temporal, and inferior parietal areas

Question 45

The information that a listener derives from the speech rhythm and pitch of the speaker's voice is referred to as morphological.

Question 46

According to Levelt, information-specific networks exist for word forms at the ________ level and for the grammatical properties of words at the ________ level.

A)N400; P600
B)lexeme; lemma
C)semantic; parsing
D)frontal; temporal

Question 47

Modular models of language comprehension argue for a high degree of interactivity between different specialized modules.

Question 48

Homo sapiens have made the leap from ________ to ________ sequences.

A)gestural; manual
B)manual; gestural
C)manual; vocal
D)vocal; manual

Question 49

Saying the word "horse" when intending to say the word "cow" is an example of a semantic paraphasia.

Question 50

The brain regions involved with the unification process in Hagoort's model suggest that a person with a major comprehension deficit due to significant damage in Brodmann area 45 (BA45) could be expected to exhibit which of the following?

A)an abnormal N400
B)an abnormal P600
C)both an abnormal N400 and an abnormal P600
D)None of the answer options is correct.

Question 51

Semantic priming effects are due to spreading activation in many models of lexical processing.

Question 52

What is the main reason that there has been more success teaching nonhuman primates to use sign language than spoken language?

A)Hand signals are easier than vocalizations.
B)Vocalizations are better controlled in humans.
C)Control of manual gestures is better in nonhuman primates.
D)All of the answer options are correct.

Question 53

The Spanish language uses the logographic system for written words.

Question 54

In Hagoort's language model, the "memory" component is mediated by the ________, the "unification" component by the ________, and the "control" component by the ________.

A)inferior frontal cortex; temporal lobe; lateral frontal cortex
B)inferior frontal cortex; lateral frontal cortex; temporal lobe
C)temporal lobe; lateral frontal cortex; inferior frontal cortex
D)temporal lobe; inferior frontal gyrus; lateral frontal cortex

Question 55

A normal adult speaker has passive knowledge of about 50,000 words.

Question 56

Animal calls were thought to be purely emotional. Which of the following findings with monkey calls does NOT contradict this view?

A)A call in presence of a snake led to monkeys looking down.
B)A call in presence of a leopard led monkeys to flee into the trees.
C)A call is seldom made when a monkey is alone.
D)Calls can be strung together in predictable orders.

Question 57

Considering the Memory and Unification components of Hagoort's model of language comprehension, during a conversation with your professor,

A)memory would be working to remember what your professor was saying.
B)unification would be integrating information your professor was saying with information you previously knew about the subject.
C)memory would be recalling the previous interactions you'd had with your professor.
D)unification would be pulling together and integrating various components of the words coming out of your professor's mouth to process what she was saying.

Question 58

According to Levelt's (1989) model of speech production, two main processing stages are involved in generating a meaningful utterance. In the ________ stage, the speaker determines what he or she intends to express to the listener; in the ________ stage, word choices and the grammatical role that each word will play are determined.

A)microplanning; macroplanning
B)macroplanning; lemma
C)microplanning; lemma
D)macroplanning; microplanning

Question 59

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that make a difference to meaning.

Question 60

Under certain circumstances, when the conceptual representation of an item is activated, there is subsequent difficulty activating the corresponding word form in the mental lexicon, even though other information about the item can be accessed. This phenomenon is called

A)minimal attachment.
B)dysarthria.
C)lemma interference.
D)the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

Question 61

Describe Levelt's model of language production. What evidence has been used to support this model?

Question 62

What is conduction aphasia? What causes this syndrome? How does it differ from Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia?

Question 63

What are the three stages of processing after a word is perceptually analyzed? Does this differ for visual and auditory processing? Why or why not?

Question 64

What pathway does spoken word recognition take in the brain? Describe the role of the most important areas in this network.

Question 65

What is the difference between Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia? Where are Broca's area and Wernicke's area located in the brain?

Question 66

What is a semantic paraphasia? What does this tell us about the way in which words are organized in the mental lexicon?

Question 67

Generative theories of language evolution suggest a connection between speech and what other human communication form? Provide evidence to support this view.

Question 68

Listening to a sentence like "He spreads the warm bread with socks" will evoke a P600 brain potential.

Question 69

The immediate assignment of syntactic structure of incoming words is known as parsing.

Question 70

Describe Hagoort's model of language, including its three functional components and the brain areas to which they relate.

Question 71

What role does the right hemisphere play in language comprehension? Describe two experimental techniques that would allow you to dissociate the contribution of the right hemisphere from that of the left.