Language Science Test

Front 1

Semantics deals with:

Back 1

the meanings of words and sentences

Front 2

Syntax refers to:

Back 2

the grammatical arrangement of words within the sentence

Front 3

The study of the relationship between the brain and language is termed:

Back 3

neurolinguistics

Front 4

The relationship between 'picked' and 'up' in the sentence 'George picked the baby up" is:

Back 4

associative chain

Front 5

Chomsky used the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" to illustrate the point that:

Back 5

the associative chain theory of language was invalid

Front 6

The interdisciplinary field that studies the mind and mental processes is called:

Back 6

cognitive science

Front 7

Content words, which include nouns, verbs, and adj., are known as _____ words.

Back 7

open-class

Front 8

Words that function together in a sentence (such as 'called up') are called:

Back 8

constituents

Front 9

The poverty of stimulus argument refers to the fact that:

Back 9

children cannot learn language solely from the language samples they hear

Front 10

Phonology refers to:

Back 10

the system of sounds in a language

Front 11

Associative Chain Theory

Back 11

a theory favored by behaviorists that explains the formulation of a sentence as a chain of associations between the individual words in the sentence

Front 12

Constituents

Back 12

a grammatical unit such as a noun or verb phrase

Front 13

The way we construct and articulate utterances is known as:

Back 13

language production

Front 14

Tacit knowledge of language is best illustrated by:

Back 14

our ability to perform activities such as listening and speaking without fully understanding the processes involved in them

Front 15

The relation between 'phoned' and 'up' in the sentence "John phoned the woman with the curly hair up" is handled within transformational grammar by the:

Back 15

particle-movement transformation

Front 16

Particle-Movement Transformation

Back 16

a transformational rule that accounts for the movement of particles such as up around noun phrases

Front 17

According to Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) the difference between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN) is that:

Back 17

FLN only includes recursion, and so is unique to humans

Front 18

The smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in meaning is a:

Back 18

phoneme

Front 19

Which of the following is an example of deep structure ambiguity?
-The child thinks the man left.
-They are eating apples.
-John is easy to please.
-Flying planes can be dangerous.

Back 19

flying planes can be dangerous

Front 20

Experiments that show that subjects use transformational rules and structures when processing sentences provide evidence for:

Back 20

the psychological reality of grammar

Front 21

The set of rules needed to generate a sentence is called its:

Back 21

derivation

Front 22

The system of rules that governs how different forms of the same word may be used to convey different shades of meaning is referred to as:

Back 22

morphology

Front 23

A theory of language that explains the role of linguistic universals in evolution is said to have:

Back 23

explanatory adequacy

Front 24

explanatory adequacy

Back 24

the extent to which a grammar can explain the facts of language acquisition

Front 25

The initial sounds in the words big and dig are:

Back 25

different phonemes

Front 26

The underlying meaning of a sentence is referred to as its:

Back 26

deep structure

Front 27

A theory of language that specifies the relationships among various sequences in the language is said to have:

Back 27

descriptive adequacy

Front 28

Linguistic productivity is best described as the ability to:

Back 28

produce and comprehend novel sentences

Front 29

Bresnan's lexical-functional grammar:

Back 29

replaces transformational rules wit more complete lexical entries

Front 30

If two distinct phrase markers can be derived fro a single sentence, the sentence is said to be:

Back 30

ambiguous

Front 31

In contrast with transformational grammar, lexical theories place:

Back 31

greater emphasis on individual words

Front 32

A rule that refers to itself, such as the rule a sentence may be rewritten as a NP and V and S is called a:

Back 32

recursive rule

Front 33

Memories of childhood vacations are stored in:

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episodic memory

Front 34

______ experience childhood amnesia, and cannot recall events before their 3rd birthday

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all adults

Front 35

In Diamond's (1985) study of object permanence, infants as young as 7 1/2 months were able to solve the problem if:

Back 35

they were allowed to immediately search for the object

Front 36

The type of measure that hold traces of events that are specific to a time and place is called ______ memory.

Back 36

episodic

Front 37

Which is NOT true of neural network models
-They have not yet been shown to be useful for modeling language processes.
-They are an important alternative to serial models of processing.
-They are useful for modeling cognitive processes.
-They are based on patterns of excitatory and inhibitory neural activity.

Back 37

They have not yet been shown to be useful for modeling language processes

Front 38

Processing that proceeds from the lowest level to the higher levels in such a way that all of the lower levels of processing operate without influence from the higher levels is called _____ processing.

Back 38

bottom-up processing

Front 39

Information that is being processed by the cognitive system is temporarily held in ________ memory

Back 39

working

Front 40

A test in which increasingly longer lists of items (such as numbers or words) are presented for later recall is called a ______ test.

Back 40

memory span

Front 41

Object permanence refers to:

Back 41

understanding that an object exists even if it cannot be perceived

Front 42

_____ models are inspired by patterns of neural activity in the brain

Back 42

parallel distributed processing

Front 43

Children's pretend play is developmentally important because:

Back 43

it signifies that one object can stand for another

Front 44

What conclusion can be drawn from the text's discussion of the "Ali" sentence?
"I was afraid of Ali's powerful punch, especially since it had already laid out many tougher men who had bragged they could handle that much alcohol."

Back 44

our intuitions regarding sentence comprehension are not always accurate

Front 45

_______ models divide the activities involved in processing language into non-overlapping stages

Back 45

serial

Front 46

Piaget referred to the concepts we use to organize our experiences as:

Back 46

schemata

Front 47

For speech processing to be modular it must:

Back 47

be domain specific

Front 48

Pollack and Pickett (1964) showed that when a word is isolated from its context it becomes:

Back 48

less intelligible than in context

Front 49

Researchers studying _______ are most likely to make use of a speech spectrogram

Back 49

acoustic phonetics

Front 50

_____ are produced by impeding the airflow at some location in the vocal tract.

Back 50

consonants

Front 51

The delay in the release of vocal cord vibration between the release of a consonant and the start of a vowel is called:

Back 51

voice onset time

Front 52

The speech sounds [p] [b] and [k] are instances of

Back 52

stop consonants

Front 53

The movements of the eyes during reading are called:

Back 53

saccades

Front 54

The dual-route model explains how we can:

Back 54

pronounce words we've never seen before

Front 55

The connectionist model showing that various levels of speech processing occur simultaneously and interactively is known as:

Back 55

TRACE model

Front 56

Neisser's (1964) study of visual search, in which subjects search a list of letters for a target letter, provided evidence for the role of ______ in speech perception

Back 56

features

Front 57

Readers pick up visual information:

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during a fixation

Front 58

A formant is:

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a band of energy in a spectrogram

Front 59

The acoustic information that specifies a phoneme will change based on preceding or following phonemes. This is known as:

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context-conditioned variation

Front 60

The study of speech sounds that references the movements within the vocal tract is:

Back 60

articulatory phonetics

Front 61

In a study on categorical perception, listeners hear two sounds and then a third, and determine if the third sound was the same as the first or the second. Results show that:

Back 61

performance 100% is at chance if the two sounds are from the same phonetic category

Front 62

The phenomenon of producing more than one speech sound at a time is called:

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coarticulation

Front 63

The fact that we can perceive letters in a word context better than individual letters is referred to as:

Back 63

the word-superiority effect

Front 64

The production of vowels is characterized by:

Back 64

the position and height of the tongue

Front 65

We use _________ to distinguish between the two meanings of 'blackbird'

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stress

Front 66

The lack of invariance refers to the fact that there is non one-to-one correspondence between:

Back 66

acoustic cues and perceptual experience

Front 67

________ maps sounds of language onto written symbols or characters.

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orthography

Front 68

The speech sounds [t] [d] and [s] are instances of:

Back 68

alveolar consonants

Front 69

The motor theory of speech perception:

Back 69

contends that we perceive speech by reference to production

Front 70

The use of pitch to signify different meanings is:

Back 70

intonation