Test Bank for Language in Mind An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Chapter 2: Origins of Human Language Multiple Choice 1. The theoretical perspective that humans’ ability to learn language is not the result of innate or genetically based predisposition that evolved specifically for language, but an aspect of our cognitive abilities, including general abilities of learning and memory is known as a. anti-nativist theory. b. linguistic theory. c. psychodynamic theory. d. evolutionary theory.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 2. Which language researcher attempted to define language with 16 characteristics, or design features, of spoken human language? a. Chomsky b. Hockett c. Pinker d. Darwin Answer: b Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 3. Bees introduced into a hive of bee species different from their own will likely “dance” according to a. the new hive style. b. their own unique style, unrelated to past experience. c. the style of their own genetic ancestors. d. a combination of old and new styles.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 4. Which of Hockett’s design features of human language can also be attributed to honeybee communication? a. Arbitrariness b. Duality of patterning

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

c. Reflexiveness d. Interchangeability Answer: d Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 5. Experiments in which apes are taught a language or symbolic system indicate that apes can a. learn to use symbols to communicate, but only if they are not arbitrary. b. learn to use words accurately, but only to refer to objects that are physically present. c. use combinations of familiar symbols to express new concepts. d. combine words into sentences as well as a human 3-year-old is able to.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 6. Even though vervet monkeys seem to be able to produce specific distress calls from birth without the benefit of experience, they acquire the ability to respond appropriately to those calls only after several months of life, presumably due to experience. This finding suggests that a. human language and vervet calls arise from different cognitive mechanisms. b. vervet calls are a direct evolutionary precursor of human language. c. the ability to produce human language is innate but the ability to understand it is not. d. human infants need a great deal of exposure to language before they can understand it, but less exposure is needed to produce it.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 7. An example of Hockett’s productivity characteristic in non-human primate communication would be demonstrated by an ape making the sign for a. banana in order to ask a researcher for a banana. b. banana when the researcher points to a banana. c. sweet sausage when asked to identify a banana before having learned the sign for banana. d. door when asked to identify a banana.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 8. The awareness between two or more individuals that they are paying attention to the same thing is known as a. homesign. b. linguistic code. c. universal grammar. d. joint attention.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 2.2 Social Underpinnings of Language Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

9. Given a choice between two buckets in which only one bucket contains a treat, a chimpanzee will be likely to choose a bucket that a human reached for a bucket that a human pointed to. a. less; than b. more; than c. equally; as d. as un-; as Answer: b Textbook Reference: 2.2 Social Underpinnings of Language Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 10. Hare and Tomasello found that chimpanzees will reach for a bucket containing a treat if a human reaches for the same bucket—but not if the human points to the bucket to signal the presence of a treat in it. This suggests that chimpanzees do not understand the a. intention of others to act in certain ways. b. language of others. c. intention of others to communicate with them. d. sign language of others.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.2 Social Underpinnings of Language Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 11. Researchers have found that chimpanzees are not able to understand pointing cues but dogs are able to do so. This suggests that compared to chimpanzees, dogs a. are more intelligent. b. are better at picking up social cues. c. have superior language skills. d. are more motivated by food.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 2.2 Social Underpinnings of Language Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 12. A 30-month-old child, who at 6 months engaged relatively little with her parents in jointattention activities, is expected to than a 30-month-old who had at 6 months engaged more in joint-attention activities. a. have a smaller vocabulary b. demonstrate worse social skills c. exhibit more imperative pointing d. exhibit more declarative pointing Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.2 Social Underpinnings of Language Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 13. Research suggests that human children produce more examples of than apes, who produce primarily messages. a. imperative; declarative b. declarative; imperative

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communication

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

c. altruistic; declarative d. imperative, altruistic Answer: b Textbook Reference: 2.2 Social Underpinnings of Language Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 14. is the set of rules that determines how linguistic elements, such as words, can be combined to convey meaning. a. Evolutionary adaptation b. Productivity c. Recursion d. Syntax Answer: d Textbook Reference: 2.3 The Structure of Language Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 15. The theory of universal grammar claims that a. all human languages can be described by essentially the same rules of grammar. b. all species of primates have the capacity to learn grammar. c. humans are born with implicit knowledge of the rules of grammar of all human languages. d. humans are born with a predisposition to learn certain kinds of structures more easily than other kinds of structures.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 2.3 The Structure of Language Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 16. Chomsky suggested that human knowledge must have a(n) component, as evidenced by the slave boy/Pythagorean theorem dialogue demonstration. a. learned b. altruistic c. memorized d. innate Answer: d Textbook Reference: 2.3 The Structure of Language Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 17. The theory of universal grammar predicts that a. a new language discovered in a remote region of South America would have structural patterns that children are innately predisposed to learn. b. learning French will be easier for a child born to French-speaking parents than for a child born to Japanese-speaking parents who was adopted by French-speaking parents as an infant. c. a child will be unable to learn a language with recursion. d. all languages will be equally easy to learn at any time in one’s life.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.3 The Structure of Language Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

18. Keith and Cathy Hayes (1951) were able to teach Viki, a young female chimpanzee, to a. utter several dozen vocalized human words. b. utter just four indistinct human words. c. utter several words in French. d. communicate using American Sign Language.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 19. Cross-fostering experiments suggest that the main reason primates do not produce humanlike variety in their vocalizations is because apes a. lack the motivation to speak. b. are not raised in the same language-evoking way human infants are. c. lack the physical apparatus and control over it to produce human-like speech. d. cannot breathe and swallow simultaneously.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 20. A comparison of birdsong with human language suggests that a. songbirds are pre-programmed to sing specific songs from birth, whereas children have to be exposed to speech sounds in order to be able to produce them. b. songbirds can only produce memorized sequences of sounds, whereas children can produce novel combinations of words. c. both human infants and young songbirds must practice their vocal skills in order to master them. d. both children and songbirds show evidence of Hockett’s feature of semanticity in their communication.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 21. Some researchers argue that the birds and aquatic mammals that produce complex arrays of linguistic sounds to communicate with their peers are using a(n) a. affective pathway. b. cognitive pathway. c. larynx. d. universal grammar.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 22. The difference between a monkey sounding an alarm call and a bird mimicking sounds from its environment is that the bird is using a(n) a. in-born behavior. b. affective pathway. c. cognitive pathway.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

d. social behavior.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 23. Which animal is able to gesture in a flexible way to indicate its intention? a. Dog b. Cat c. Bee d. Chimpanzee Answer: d Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 24. An infant born in the United States would demonstrate early attempts at language production through babbling. Her babbling would most likely a. contain primarily the speech sounds made around her. b. comprise random sounds, but be organized by a universal grammar. c. contain some words she hears people speaking around her. d. be unrelated to her parents’ speech.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 25. Can a young deaf child, born into a hearing family, communicate with her parents? a. No, deaf children cannot communicate with anyone until someone teaches them sign language. b. No, all children know American Sign Language at birth, but their hearing parents will have forgotten their knowledge of sign language from disuse. c. Yes, deaf children usually invent a gestural language to communicate with their parents. d. Yes, but only if their parents know sign language.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.5 How Humans Invent Language Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 26. If a child is taught a foreign language during her sensitive period in language development, she will a. most likely speak the language with her native accent and have difficulty mastering the language’s nuances. b. most likely master and speak the foreign language as well as a native speaker. c. learn pronunciation easily, but struggle to learn its grammatical rules. d. have difficulty with pronunciation of the foreign language, but easily learn its grammatical rules.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 2.5 How Humans Invent Language Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

27. A 2009 study by Feher et al. showed that, over the course of several generations, the songs of birds raised by isolates become remarkably similar to those of normal adult birds. These results support the a. nativist view of bird song origins. b. anti-nativist view of bird song origins. c. cultural transmission view of language change. d. universal grammar perspective.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.5 How Humans Invent Language Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 28. Which statement conveys the most accurate comparison of spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL)? a. ASL is a way for individuals in the deaf community to communicate with one another but is not as structured and organized as spoken English. b. ASL uses grammatical rules and structures that are very similar to those found in English. c. ASL uses grammatical structures that are systematic, but very different from those found in English. d. ASL is a system of pantomime invented by the deaf community whereas spoken English is a real language.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.5 How Humans Invent Language Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 29. The system of symbols, agreed upon by a community of language users, that conveys specific meaning is known as a. a linguistic code. b. a cognitive pathway. c. homesign. d. recursion.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.5 How Humans Invent Language Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 30. is a genetic disorder in which some language functions seem relatively intact, while other complex cognitive abilities are markedly impaired. a. Working memory deficit b. Williams syndrome c. Downs syndrome d. Specific language impairment Answer: b Textbook Reference: 2.6 Language and Genes Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 31. Mental age can be defined as a person’s a. measure of ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks. b. overall level of social functioning as it relates to other individuals in his or her age group.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

c. overall level of cognitive functioning as it relates to other individuals in his or her age group. d. age at which he or she acquires most of the advanced problem-solving skills.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.6 Language and Genes Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 32. Six-year old Olivia has trouble expressing herself verbally and seems to have an abnormally short working memory span. Doctors have not been able to find any specific neurological or physiological problems, but her twin sister, Jane, seems to have similar impairments. If you were her pediatrician, which of the following disorders of speech would you believe was affecting Olivia? a. Downs syndrome b. FOXP2 syndrome c. Specific language impairment d. Williams syndrome Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.6 Language and Genes Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 33. A researcher who believes the domain-specific perspective of specific language impairment (SLI) would argue that SLI occurs due to a. an interaction of language-related cognitive impairments. b. a complex interaction of linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive impairments. c. innate and genetic factors affecting general cognition. d. an abnormal home environment affecting language acquisition.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.6 Language and Genes Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 34. The evolution of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) occurred over generations, guided by a. a small, isolated, and highly homogenous population. b. a large geographical and social pool of individuals. c. an existing spoken language from which the critical components of ABSL were developed. d. only the deaf members of the community.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 2.7 Survival of the Fittest Language?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 35. The cultural transmission view of language change holds that a. the brains of geographically isolated individuals develop differently than the brains of those individuals that can exchange ideas and learn each others’ languages. b. our brains adapt to the language we invent. c. languages change over time, responding to pressures to be communicatively useful and easy to learn. d. human language developed as a by-product of our physiology.

Answer: c

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 2.7 Survival of the Fittest Language?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 36. Which scenario would most likely result in significant language change? a. A community of deaf adults, who are native signers of American Sign Language, teaching American Sign Language to hearing children. b. A community of hearing adults, who are native signers of American Sign Language, teaching American Sign Language to deaf children. c. A community of native German-speaking adult immigrants to the United States speaking to their children in English from birth. d. A community of native French speakers teaching English-speaking immigrant children to speak French in the first grade.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 2.7 Survival of the Fittest Language?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Short Answer 1. What empirical evidence suggests that bees have an innate dance “dialect?”

Answer: When bees from another species are introduced into a new hive, they continue to “dance” according to their genetic ancestors’ style, they do not take on the dance of their new hive members.

Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. Viki, a chimpanzee, can produce only four indistinct words of spoken English, whereas Alex, a parrot, can clearly pronounce more than 100 words. Can we conclude from this that Alex’s linguistic capabilities are superior to Viki’s? Why or why not?

Answer: No. We are likely to underestimate Viki’s linguistic abilities if we consider only her spoken language because chimpanzees are limited by their vocal apparatus and may lack the cognitive ability to accurately imitate vocal sounds. The fact that they are able to acquire large vocabularies using signs or other symbols suggests that their speech does not accurately reflect their language skills. In addition, when assessing linguistic capabilities, it is important to consider not only whether an animal is capable of producing a word, but also whether it has understood its meaning. It is possible that Alex is simply imitating the sounds of words without being able to use them as meaningful symbols in a variety of appropriate contexts.

Textbook Reference: 2.1 Why Us? Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 3. In terms of social cognition and intention, how does human pointing behavior tend to differ from ape pointing behavior?

Answer: According to Tomasello (2006), apes point mostly to call attention to objects they wish to possess, whereas humans also often point in an effort to comment on aspects of the world and to assist others by conveying information about the environment, often in an altruistic manner.

Textbook Reference: 2.2 Social Underpinnings of Language Bloom’s Category: 2. Understanding 4. Explain how comparative studies can help us understand various species’ cognitive abilities, and give an example of a comparative study.

Answer: Comparative studies are research designs in which the abilities of different species are compared to each other in targeted experiments. Researchers design tests that are appropriate for all of the species being studied and compare outcomes among the various species being studied.

Such studies can illuminate similarities and differences among species, indicate possible evolutionary relationships, and provide evidence about which cognitive abilities tend to cluster together across species. An example would be the study by Hermann et al. (2007) in which researchers evaluated chimpanzees, orangutans, and human toddlers to see how they compared in their social understanding and their understanding of the physical world. They found that chimpanzees performed as well as human toddlers (and better than orangutans) in their understanding of the physical world, but both primate species performed much worse than humans on the social tasks. This suggests that understanding of the physical world and understanding of the social world have followed different evolutionary paths. Furthermore, because only humans spontaneously use language, this hints at a possible connection between the evolution of social skills and the evolution of language.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 2.2 Social Underpinnings of Language Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 5. What is duality of patterning, and how is this feature beneficial for a communication system?

Answer: Duality of patterning involves the combination of smaller units that alone convey no meaning, such as sounds, into larger, meaningful units, such as words. This feature is useful because it allows a relatively small number of units to be combined together to signal a very large set of unique meanings. Users of a communication system without duality of patterning would have to learn completely different holistic sounds corresponding to different meanings.

For example, they might have to learn to produce a yelp to refer to the concept of a bat and a low guttural sound to refer to the concept of a cat, rather than re-using some of the sound units between one word and another. This would require them to be able to produce and memorize a very large set of completely distinct sounds. Difficulties in doing so might place an an upper limit on the number of words possible in the vocabulary of such a communication system.

Textbook Reference: 2.3 The Structure of Language Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 6. Do you agree with the nativist view of the evolution of language? Provide evidence to support your argument.

Answer: .Answers may vary. Evidence against the nativist view: a. Children receive much more linguistic input than previously estimated by supporters of the nativist view, undermining the idea that the linguistic input received by children is not sufficient to explain the complexity of their linguistic knowledge. b. Cognitive processes that have been described in the past as being specific to language are now recognized as more generally cognitive and applying to tasks outside of language processing. c. Non-human animals seem to possess language abilities that previously were believed to be associated only with humans. d. Human languages appear to be much more diverse than was believed in the past, undermining the notion that humans are predisposed to learn a very constrained set of structures.

Evidence for the nativist view: a. Some possible patterns of language (based on the number of possible combinations) do not occur, which was interpreted by Chomsky as evidence of some innate constraints on human linguistic behavior. b. Other non-human animals seem to have been genetically pre-programmed for specific sounds and gestures, supporting the general idea that communicative behaviors may be genetically determined.

Textbook Reference: 2.3 The Structure of Language Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 7. Refer to the figure.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Discuss how the differences between chimpanzee and human vocal anatomy affect each species’ ability to produce vocal language. What is the evolutionary significance of these differences?

Answer: In humans, the larynx sits lower in the vocal tract than it does in chimpanzees, so the tongue has more room to move and articulate and is thus able to create a greater number of distinct sounds. In chimpanzees, the height of the larynx makes simultaneous breathing and swallowing possible. Although the shape and position of the human tongue may contribute to our ability to articulate sounds, it makes simultaneous breathing and swallowing impossible, introducing the (lethal) possibility of choking. This tradeoff suggests that the ability to create complex sounds and speech has been evolutionarily important.

Textbook Reference: 2.3 The Structure of Language Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 8. Compare the language learning outcomes of: 1) a human infant raised by adoptive parents who speak a language other than that of the infant’s birth parents with 2) the sounds produced by rhesus macaque monkeys raised by Japanese macaques, instead of their biological parents.

Answer: When humans are raised by adoptive human parents from infancy, they are able to acquire the language of their adoptive parents perfectly, whereas cross-fostered macaques will sound much more similar to their biological parents than their adoptive parents.

Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 9. How does the use of gesture by apes in the wild differ from the use of alarm calls by vervet monkeys? Which more closely resembles the linguistic behavior of humans?

Answer: Wild ape gestures appear to be learned within a community of apes, so apes in one group may use gestures that are different from those of another group. Apes can use the same gesture in a variety of communicative contexts, demonstrating that their use of gestures is highly flexible. In contrast, vervet monkeys appear to be born with the ability to produce certain threatspecific alarm calls, which are understood by all other vervets. Moreover, unlike ape gestures, vervet calls lack flexibility because they are only used to communicate warnings. Ape gestures resemble human linguistic communication more closely than vervet calls do because, rather than

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

being biologically programmed, human language must be learned within a community of other humans using language and human language also exhibits flexibility.

Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 10. Refer to the figure.

Figure A demonstrates how a hearing individual might use a gesture, along with speech, to describe rolling downhill. Figure B demonstrates how someone using sign language might gesture to convey the same action. What do the images tell us about how each individual uses gestures to convey information? Why is this an important distinction in linguistics, and how does it allow sign languages to resemble spoken languages in terms of their expressive power?

Answer: Hearing individuals tend to use gestures to supplement a verbal message. They incorporate multiple aspects of the message into one gesture, using it to illustrate or emphasize one aspect of the message. An individual fluent in NSL relies on signs to convey the core meaning of the message and as such, each critical aspect of the message is represented by a separate sign. This allows sign language to have similar expressive power to spoken languages because separate signs can be combined flexibly with other signs to express a great variety of complex ideas.

Textbook Reference: 2.4 The Evolution of Speech Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 11. Senghas et al. (2004) noticed that during the formation and evolution of Nicaraguan Sign Language, purely gestural signs tended to develop a more linguistic style as the sign language evolved from earlier to later “generations” of signers. How would a late-generation signer of NSL describe a bird flying up?

Answer: Instead of representing one motion of a “bird flying up” in one holistic gesture, a signer uses one gesture to convey the concept of a “bird” followed by a separate gesture conveying the action of “rising” or “flying.”

Textbook Reference: 2.5 How Humans Invent Language Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 12. Explain how Williams Syndrome (WMS) aids us in understanding how human language is organized in the brain.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Answer: Williams Syndrome is a genetically based set of symptoms in which certain cognitive, physical, and physiological problems are evident but language fluidity and expression remain quite high functioning. At first, WMS seemed to provide evidence for a genetically specific language module in the brain that is dissociated from overall intelligence, but further researcher suggested that, if you compare people with WMS to a control group of children with the same mental age, their language skills are not actually spared.

Textbook Reference: 2.6 Language and Genes Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 13. Jasmine is a 9-year-old whose IQ is lower than that of her peers. She also produces incoherent speech and demonstrates grammatical difficulties as well. In addition, she has trouble generating certain facial gestures and humming a jingle. Her younger sister is learning language normally and appears to have no other deficits. Identify the most likely explanation for Jasmine’s condition and why you arrived at your answer.

Answer: It is likely that Jasmine has inherited a FOXP2 mutation, which typically produces the cluster of symptoms described. The fact that Jasmine’s sister has not demonstrated these symptoms indicates that Jasmine’s problem is genetic and not a product of the environment in which both she and her sister live.

Textbook Reference: 2.6 Language and Genes Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 14. Refer to the figure shown here.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Consider the drawings and the words they represent from Theisen et al. (2010). Explain how the participants’ synthetic language “evolved” over the course of the experiment and what these changes imply about how other languages have evolved over time.

Answer: Over the course of the experiment, participants drew images that became less detailed and more abstract to express the same concepts. This development suggests that shared knowledge of symbols allows them to become simpler and more efficient. Another development in the synthetic visual language was that over time, users developed symbols to represent core concepts and combined them with other elements to express related concepts. For example, the same symbol resembling a piece of paper with writing on it appeared in the related concepts professor, lecturing, university, and lecture theater. This strategy suggests that when they invent a new communication system, people quickly settle on a system that combines elements in systematic ways, a property that is found in all human languages.

Textbook Reference: 2.7 Survival of the Fittest Language?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

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Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 3: Language and the Brain Multiple Choice 1. A neurolinguist would most likely study a. the physical organization of the cerebral cortex, including fissures, grooves and the vessels that transport blood and nutrients throughout this system. b. how a lesion in Wernicke’s area might affect language production. c. the effects of dopamine on depression. d. the effects of moving to a new school on children’s self esteem.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: Intro Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 2. Which of the following sentences would you expect a patient with Broca’s aphasia to have the most difficulty understanding? a. The dog bit the man. b. The sorbet that the lady is eating is sour. c. The girl who the boy is pushing is big. d. The mail carrier who the dog bit called the police.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 3. The cerebral cortex is a. smooth with little or no convolutions. b. the outermost layer of neurons covering the brain. c. only used 10% of the time. d. only found in humans.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 4. Scientists in Phineas Gage’s time a. knew a great deal about how the brain is organized and which cerebral areas are responsible for which cognitive abilities. b. were just beginning to decipher the relationship between the physical components of the brain and their relationship to human behavior. c. used sophisticated methodologies and techniques to indentify how the physical brain relates to human behavior. d. had little interest in understanding the relationship between neural components and behavior.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 5. Studies such as those published by Nina Dronkers and her colleagues (2004) indicate that language functioning a. is contained within specific, independent brain “organs.” b. is affected in similar ways regardless of where in the brain damage occurs. c. is distributed across several different brain regions. d. can be restored even in cases of severe brain injury.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 6. Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) is most useful because it allows researchers to a. precisely correlate diminished performance with damage to specific parts of the brain. b. study the impact of brain lateralization. c. identify and define Brodmann areas. d. assess language comprehension in aphasic patients.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 7. Broca’s aphasia is characterized by a patient’s inability to a. understand spoken language. b. understand written text. c. speak fluently. d. understand the function of objects in their environment.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 8. Which would you expect to be especially difficult for a patient with Broca’s aphasia? a. Understanding a political candidate's speech b. Delivering a speech without pauses or hesitations c. Getting the gist of an audiobook d. Following a movie that has a great deal of dialogue Answer: b Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 9. A person with Wernicke’s aphasia will demonstrate a. halting speech. b. inability to produce speech. c. nonsensical speech. d. normal ability to comprehend speech.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

10. A physician asks four patients with aphasia to describe how to make a peanut butter sandwich. Which response most likely came from a patient with Wernicke’s aphasia? a. “Sure, no problem. Open the jar and, uh, uh, uh … peanut, oops, no, no knife …spread and, uh … bread … sprea-ding … jeeelly … wait …” b. “I’d put a glob of peanut butter from the jar onto a knife, spread it onto one piece of bread, put some jelly on another slice of bread, spread that, and then put the two pieces of bread together.” c. “Me like peanuts. Me spread. Jelly on bread. Put together. Me eat.” d. “Obviously I’d think it’s utzkin, though certainly I do want to go when it’s vehubative. I would recommend placing a spoon in the bowl. I do wobble and frink.”

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 11. A surgeon conducting an autopsy on a patient who had suffered from Broca’s aphasia would most likely find damage in the a. corpus callosum. b. right frontal lobe. c. left occipital lobe. d. left frontal lobe.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 12. Wilder Penfield’s research on the localization of function in the brain demonstrated that when Broca’s area is stimulated in a conscious person, a. the effect is always the same; namely that the ability to understand language is disrupted. b. the effect is always the same; namely that the ability to produce language is disrupted. c. although the effect may be varied, depending on the individual being stimulated, it will likely be related to linguistic abilities. d. although the effect may be varied, depending on the individual being stimulated, it will likely be related to non-linguistic abilities.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 13. You are examining a split-brain patient. After flashing a picture of a bird in the patient’s left visual field, which response are you likely to get? a. The patient says “bird” but is unable to chirp. b. The patient says “bird” and points to a bird with the left hand. c. The patient points to a bird with the right hand but is unable to say “bird.” d. The patient points to a bird with the left hand but is unable to say “bird.”

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 14. A(n) is evident if one patient exhibits a language impairment with normal mathematical abilities and another patient exhibits a mathematical impairment with normal language. a. hemodynamic change

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b. localization c. double dissociation d. action potential Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 15. When designing an fMRI study, which would be the best strategy for isolating the neural activity associated with the vocal component of reading a word from other potential actions related to reading? a. Compare fMRI scans of a subject silently reading a word and of reading the word aloud. b. Compare fMRI scans of a subject looking at a picture that is related to a word and of reading the word aloud. c. Compare a PET scan of a subject reading a word aloud to an fMRI scan of a subject reading the same word aloud. d. Perform an fMRI scan of the participant as he is talking to a friend, noting the level of brain activity when he uses the target word.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 16. In a 2004 fMRI study of word reading, Olaf Hauk and his colleagues demonstrated that language-specific brain regions a. are the only regions responsible for interpreting and producing spoken language. b. are not the only areas activated by certain categories of words related to physical acts, such as kicking, stepping, or walking. c. are highly localized and respond primarily to written language. d. rarely interact with regions responsible for action or movement.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 17. Wernicke believed that language processing was a. highly compartmentalized in the brain, with specific modules communicating in pre-set patterns. b. distributed throughout the brain in a highly coordinated network. c. localized in one specific brain area. d. strictly contained in the left hemisphere.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 18. While the dorsal stream is responsible for “ provides us with a path for knowledge about “ a. where; how b. how; what c. who; what d. what; how Answer: b

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” information, the ventral stream ” information.

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 19. During a visit to a coffee shop, a patient who has a lesion along the dorsal stream of information processing would have the most trouble a. identifying liquid in a mug as coffee. b. understanding the items on the menu. c. reaching for his coffee without knocking it over. d. remembering the name of the server.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 20. Which of the following is an example of procedural memory? a. Recalling the author of a favorite poem b. Remembering the contents of a painting c. Remembering how to ski d. Recalling a zip code Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 21. In terms of memory systems, declarative recall is to as procedural recall is to . a. remembering the date of your mother’s birthday; flipping pancakes b. flipping pancakes; remembering your zip code c. remembering your zip code; remembering your phone number d. riding a skateboard; flipping pancakes Answer: a Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 22. A deaf ASL signer suffering from Broca’s aphasia would a. have a difficult time mimicking and lip reading what a hearing person was trying to convey. b. have a difficult time understanding what other signers are signing in ASL. c. have difficulty interpreting pantomime signs produced by hearing individuals. d. have a difficult time generating ASL signs they once knew well.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 23. A nineteenth century phrenologist would most likely be found a. using psychoanalytic techniques to investigate a client’s personality characteristics. b. describing a client’s psychological traits based on the physical attributes on a client’s skull. c. conducting neural surgery to help patients with physical brain trauma. d. mapping brain regions using patients with brain trauma.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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24. fMRI scans would find that English and Mandarin speakers a. both process tone information in the right hemisphere. b. both process tone information in the left hemispheres. c. process tone information differentially, with Mandarin speakers showing activation in the language areas for tones and English speakers showing activation in non-linguistic, sound processing regions. d. process tone information differentially, with English speakers showing activation in the language areas for tones and Mandarin speakers showing activation in non-linguistic, sound processing regions.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 25. Information flows through a neuron from a. synapse to cell body to dendrites to axon. b. dendrites to cell body to axon to synapse. c. cell body to dendrites to synapse to axon. d. axon to cell body to synapse to dendrites.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 26. Refer to figures A and B.

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What is the main benefit of using the technique represented in image B over the technique represented in image A? a. fMRI scans can be conducted on live participants whereas ERPs are dangerous for live participant research. b. ERPs provide a more precise position for activation of linguistic processing areas in the brain than do fMRI scans. c. fMRI scans provide more precise representations of the latency of language activation than do ERP measures. d. ERPs provide real-time information about the time course of language whereas fMRI data lag by a few seconds in demonstrating activity sequences.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 27. Imagine you are conducting an ERP study. You would expect to see an N400 waveform produced as a result of the italicized stimulus word in this sentence: a. “I like to eat toast.” b. “Toast is what I like to jump.” c. “I will jumped on the trampoline.” d. “Stephanie likes to eat ripe umbrellas.”

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 28. Imagine you are conducting an ERP study. You would expect to see a P600 waveform as a result of the italicized stimulus word in this sentence: a. “I will jump on the trampoline.”

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b. “Stephanie likes to eat unripe umbrellas.” c. “Stephanie likes to eat ripe umbrellas.” d. “I will jumped on the trampoline.”

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 29. You are a physician working with patients who have been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. If you present these patients with various types of auditory stimuli, you would likely find that a. none of the patients ever demonstrated any ERP activity due to their lack of consciousness. b. some patients produce ERP activity in response to the auditory stimuli of their names. c. some patients produce a variety of strong and distinct ERP activation when presented with action words. d. it is impossible to determine if any of the patients retain any cognitive abilities.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 30. is characterized by the inability to make sense of music while language comprehension remains unaffected. a. Amusia b. Insomnia c. Aphasia d. Arabia Answer: a Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 31. The symptoms exhibited by and illustrate a double dissociation. a. split brain; amusia b. Wernicke’s aphasia; auditory verbal agnosia c. auditory verbal agnosia; amusia d. amusia; Broca’s aphasia Answer: c Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Short Answer 1. Sanjay is a patient with distinct damage to Broca’s area, but he doesn’t seem to exhibit the constellation of language impairments that characterize Broca’s aphasia. Judy is a patient with fairly widespread damage to the left hemisphere, not limited to Broca’s area, and she has been diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia but with only some of the traditional symptoms. Explain the implications of these findings.

Answer: It is difficult to localize multi-faceted syndromes to precise brain regions. A more promising approach to understanding the relationship between brain structure and function is to localize individual symptoms associated with a disorder using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM).

Textbook Reference: 3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 2. If MRIs were available in Phineas Gage’s time, what kinds of conclusions could a researcher draw from the information available from an MRI scan his of brain after his accident? How might this information contribute to our study of the relationship between the brain and behavior?

Answer: An MRI would provide a detailed view of which areas of his brain were damaged or missing. By comparing his behavior and cognitive abilities with that of a normal individual, we would be able to describe the overall deficits suffered by Gage in comparison to someone without those specific brain injuries.

Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 3. Refer to the figure.

Identify Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, and summarize the types of linguistic deficits that patients with lesions in each would typically experience. Provide an example of spoken language that would represent lesions in each of these two cortical regions.

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Answer: Broca’s area is in the left frontal lobe (Brodmann’s area 44 and 45) and Wernicke’s area is located in the left temporal lobe (Brodmann’s area 22). While damage to Broca’s area doesn’t necessarily produce the full symptom-complex associated with Broca’s aphasia, a lesion in this area can result in difficulty producing language including halted and broken speech. For example: Soccer um…kick...uh...ball…stones...game...tomorrow. A lesion in Wernicke’s area would likely lead to the patient producing fluid speech which is largely meaningless. For example: Mountain fillows also lant while lowering into the senacious bleem.

Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 4. If you were trying to identify the brain areas responsible for speech recognition, how useful would it be to compare fMRI scans of participants who heard spoken language with those who actively read aloud the same script from a monitor? Would a direct comparison of scans in these two conditions allow you to identify the areas responsible for speech recognition? Why or why not?

Answer: It would not be useful to compare MRI scans; a direct comparison of scans in these two conditions would not allow you to identify the areas responsible for speech recognition. In the tasks described above, although the specific linguistic content is the same across both tasks, there are far too many differences between these two conditions to draw any meaningful conclusions about what the activated brain regions might be responsible for. For example, brain activity in the reading aloud condition may reflect activity due to the processing of visual stimuli in general, the mapping of symbols to sounds, or activity related to speaking. Brain activity in the listening condition may reflect activity due to the processing of auditory stimuli in general rather than activity that is specific to the processing of speech. In reality, multiple carefully constructed experiments would be necessary to determine all the brain areas that are responsible for speech recognition.

Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 5. Refer to the figure.

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How do each of the machines, depicted in A and B, attempt to provide evidence for mental activity? What theoretical assumption is shared by both machines? Compare the data each produces and argue which is more useful and why.

Answer: Both machines were designed to measure blood flow in the brain under the assumption that greater blood flow reflects more intense cognitive activity. Mosso’s “machine to weigh the soul,” depicted in panel A, attempted to determine whether certain mental tasks required enough cognitive activity—and hence, enough blood flow to the brain—to cause the platform on which the participant lay to tip in the direction of the participant’s head. The fMRI, shown in panel B, uses hemodynamic changes and direction of blood flow to demonstrate higher and lower levels of activity in the brain as the participant is performing various cognitive tasks. Whereas the machine to weigh the soul can only see whether blood has flowed to any location in the upper half of the body, fMRI can measure blood flow in very precise locations within the brain.

Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 6. Briefly summarize the outcome and conclusions of Hauk and colleagues’ 2004 fMRI study investigating where and how action words are processed in the brain. What does this reveal about localization?

Answer: Participants in this study, when shown words related to activities occurring near particular body regions, showed brain activation in areas related to the physical control of those areas. For example, seeing the words kick, step, or walk produced increased blood flow to regions of the brain related to motor control of the feet or legs, in addition to language areas.

Hauk et al. (2004) found that language is distributed not only across linguistically specific © 2019 Oxford University Press

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regions of the brain, but also non-linguistic areas, indicating that some tasks related to language processing reside in brain areas not previously connected to language tasks.

Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 7. Imagine that you are a psycholinguist working with a deaf ASL signer who is having trouble remembering and producing ASL signs that they once knew well but is able to carry out actions such as pouring coffee. Would you expect that any brain damage that you found would be in language-specific brain areas such as Broca’s or motor-specific areas such as the primary motor cortex?

Answer: Imaging research shows that ASL signers use the same language-specific brain areas that hearing individuals use and when experiencing trauma-related signing difficulties, signers often exhibit lesions or damage in language-specific brain regions such as Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. The patient above is more likely to have damage in a language-specific brain region than a motor region.

Textbook Reference: 3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 8. Which ERP component, the N400 or the P600, you would expect to find in a waveform generated by a participant’s brain exposed to the following sentence: Priscilla give the toast to her sister? Why? Answer: The P600 would be observed in this example. The P600 is observed when the sentence contains a grammatical anomaly, in this case, give rather than gave. The N400 is created when a nonsensical or unexpected word is found in the sentence.

Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 9. Discuss the benefits and limitations of fMRI scans and ERP measures on the representation of the time-course of language production.

Answer: An fMRI produces a visual representation of the areas of the brain that are active during a behavior related to language production, but does not provide a real-time view of the activities occurring in the brain as stimuli are being processed. Because blood flow takes time, the relevant responses are observed several seconds after a stimulus evokes the original brain activity. An ERP wave is created as a result of specific activity in the brain. Because it can be measured immediately, it can help scientists track the relationship between a stimulus and our response to that stimulus in real-time. On the other hand, fMRI scans show much more precise detail than ERP measures regarding the spatial location of active brain regions.

Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 10. Refer to the figure.

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What does the figure suggest about how the brain distinguishes between words and icons or objects?

Answer: Although we are not able to say that words are distinguished from non-words prior to 350 ms after stimulus onset based on the ERP data, we can say that visual stimuli begin to be differentiated fairly early on after initially viewing a stimulus. For instance, the separation of the orange and blue lines from all the others at 150 ms shows that we distinguish object-like stimuli from word-like stimuli very quickly. As more time passes, we observe additional distinctions in brain activity for the different types of stimuli.

Textbook Reference: 3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

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Test Bank to accompany

Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 4: Learning Sound Patterns Multiple Choice 1. Based on the results of Mehler et al.’s 1988 study of language recognition patterns in newborns, you would expect to find that a. Arabic babies can differentiate German and French sounds. b. Russian babies can differentiate Russian and French sounds. c. French babies cannot differentiate Russian and French sounds. d. Russian babies cannot differentiate Russian and French sounds.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. In a head-turn preference experiment, researchers alert the child that a sound will emanate from a particular direction by a. turning on a light in that location. b. pointing to that location. c. having the parent, on who’s lap the child is positioned, point to that location. d. increasing and decreasing the volume of the sounds until the child looks in that direction.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 3. What would be the most effective way to familiarize an infant with the head-turn preference for an experiment that investigates whether the child can differentiate between French and English words? a. Allow the child to spend several minutes habituating to the experiment room while French and English words are presented at random from speakers in opposite corners of the room. b. Allow the child to spend several minutes habituating to the experiment room while alternating red and green lights, but no sounds, are presented from opposite corners of the room. c. Allow the child to spend several minutes habituating to the experiment room while a single light is presented simultaneously with a word in one or the other language from the same side of the room. d. Allow the child to spend several minutes sitting silently on the parent’s lap in the experiment room.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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4. In Jusczyk and Aslin’s 1995 study, 7.5 month old babies could a. distinguish between a word they previously heard in a sentence and a novel word. b. not distinguish between a word they previously heard in a sentence and a novel word. c. distinguish between a word they previously heard in the voice of their parent and a new word uttered by their parent. d. not distinguish between a word they previously heard in the voice of their parent and a new word uttered by their parent.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 5. Based on the results of Bortfeld et al.’s 2005 study, you would predict that Julie, a 6-monthold, would show the most familiarity with which word in the following sentence?

Julie’s hair was cut short by the stylist. a. Hair b. Cut c. Short d. Stylist Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 6. Based on the phonotactic constraints of the English language, which nonsense word would elicit from English babies a different (longer or shorter) looking time than the others during a head-turn test? a. Mfoenidg b. Fsedoq c. Fendstom d. Eodzimdk Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 7. Trochaic stress patterns iambic patterns and place stress on the word. a. are more rare than; first b. greatly outnumber; last c. are more rare than; last d. greatly outnumber; first Answer: d Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

syllable of a

8. Which word would be easiest for 7.5-month-old babies of English-speaking parents to segment out of fluid speech? (Stress indicated by capital letters.) a. WA-ter

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b. be-GIN c. po-TA-to d. dis-CUSS Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 9. In Saffran and colleagues’ 1996 study, 8-month-olds who were habituated to streams of multisyllabic artificial words and later tested for recognition of those “words” a. could distinguish between strings of syllables that made up a word and strings of syllables that did not. b. could not distinguish between words and non-words. c. used parental cues to distinguish words from non-words. d. could distinguish between words and non-words if a researcher pointed, orienting the child.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 10. Based on the findings of Saffran et al. (1996), an 8-month-old infant would be capable of segmenting language sounds presented in a continuous stream, without intonation to represent word breaks, a. only if the stream was presented in her native language. b. only if he was seated on his parent’s lap. c. in any language, including an artificial language, as long as the streams contained multiple repetitions of the same words in varied order. d. in any language except artificial languages.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 11. According to Saffran et al. (1996), which of the following is true? a. At 8 months of age, babies show sensitivity to transitional probabilities in their own language, but not one they are unfamiliar with. b. Transitional probabilities help babies to group syllables into word-like units in the absence of any other cues. c. Transitional probabilities are useful for identifying the most frequent words but not for predicting which syllables are likely to occur together. d. Transitional probabilities become uninformative when combined with other cues, such as phonotactic information.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 12. To investigate whether an infant is using transitional probability to cluster groups of syllables into word-like units, a researcher would present the infant with a string of during the

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familiarization phase, and then record their gaze direction and time for words versus non-words in the test phase. a. familiar words from their native language b. words and non-words from a novel language c. continuous sequences of words from a novel language appearing in various orders d. sequences of syllables in any language that contain intonation and tonal cues Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 13. Implicit knowledge is to explicit knowledge as experience. a. unconscious; unconscious b. conscious; conscious c. conscious; unconscious d. unconscious; conscious Answer: d Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

experience is to

14. Babies’ seemingly miraculous ability to make sense of undifferentiated speech and segmentation of language is best characterized by their ability to extract meaningful information out of what they hear. a. conscious b. unconscious c. explicit d. learned Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 15. In an experiment evaluating human and non-human organisms’ ability to use statistical cues in environmental stimuli, you would expect to find that can pick out language-specific cues from streaming speech. a. human infants and monkeys, but not rats, b. rats and monkeys, but not human infants, c. only human infants d. human infants, monkeys, and rats Answer: d Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 16. Teinonen et al. (2009) exposed 2-day old infants to 15 minutes of speech and measured their ERP activity. Based on the findings of this study, you might predict that a. newborns would be unable to detect differences in transitional probabilities of syllables in a native language.

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b. newborns would be able to detect differences in transitional probabilities of syllables in a nonnative language. c. newborns would be unable to detect differences in transitional probabilities of syllables in any language. d. ERP is not an appropriate measure to use with infants to detect differences in transitional probabilities to auditory stimuli.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 17. The [l] sound in the words let and slate would be referred to as a(n) a. phoneme because it sounds significantly different across the two words. b. allophone because it is a variant of the same phoneme in the two words. c. allophone because it sounds significantly different across the two words. d. bilabial because it is produced by obstructing airflow.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 18. A fricative, labiodental, and voiced sound would most likely be made by a a. p. b. k. c. v. d. t.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 19. contains a fricative, whereas a. Mole; cola b. Xylophone; jury c. Ripe; dole d. Male; female Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

contains an affricate.

20. The word stove contains which types of sounds? a. Affricate and glide b. Oral stop and nasal stop c. Affricate and nasal stop d. Fricative and glide Answer: d Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

21. Which of the following words can be characterized as having a voiced word onset? a. Baby b. Pall c. Fate d. Stop Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 22. The phonemic restoration effect suggests that humans a. have an unlimited phonemic inventory. b. are able to pay attention to only one stimulus at a time. c. have a difficult time understanding degraded speech if some part of the utterance is missing. d. have the ability to understand degraded speech if most of the utterance remains intact.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 23. While Japanese speakers consider the relation between /r/ and /l/ to be fluid and thus , English speakers treat the two as distinct . a. diphthongic; allophones b. allophonic; phonemes c. phonemic; allophones d. allophonemic; diphthongs Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 24. Extrapolating from the general principles that motivate the technique used in Eimas et al.’s 1971 study, how would you expect your 1-week-old sister to respond to being shown a new toy she has never seen before? a. She would begin to cry, fearing the object. b. She would suck more vigorously on her pacifier. c. She would suck less vigorously on her pacifier. d. She would ignore the toy and look away.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 25. At what age do babies begin to sort their inventory of sounds based on the separate phonemic categories of the language they are learning? a. Immediately after birth b. At about 4 months of age c. By the end of their first year of life d. When they begin to learn to talk Answer: c

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 26. Which sound pair represents the concept of complementary distribution of allophones? a. The first sounds in colt and kip b. The vowels in beet and in bit c. The last sounds in fan and in ram d. The last sounds in in let and in led Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.4 Learning How Sounds Pattern Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 27. In French, nasalization of vowels indicates , whereas in English, the same vowel nasalization indicates . a. the presence of a diphthong; the absence of a diphthong b. minimal perceptual boundaries between allophones; distinct boundaries between phonemes c. distinct perceptual boundaries between phonemes; minimal boundaries between allophones d. the absence of a diphthong; the presence of a diphthong Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.4 Learning How Sounds Pattern Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 28. Based on White et al.’s 2008 study, you would predict that the 8.5-month-old baby of English-speaking parents would a. use the fact that [t] and [th] are in complementary distribution as a cue to learn that they are variants of the same phoneme. b. ignore the fact that /d/ and /t/ can appear in the same phonetic environments when learning which sounds represent different phonemes. c. be able to distinguish between words with voiced and unvoiced fricatives (e.g., zip, sip) but not between words with voiced and unvoiced stops (e.g., bony, pony). d. be able to predict the voicing of a fricative such as /z/ in zip based on the previous word presented before zip.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.4 Learning How Sounds Pattern Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 29. Phonetic assimilation occurs a. when phonemes change into allophones. b. when allophones change into phonemes. c. when sounds are affected by other sounds that are adjacent to them. d. when words from a foreign language become “adopted” into the home language.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.4 Learning How Sounds Pattern Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 30. The most natural grouping of phonemes is

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a. p and d. b. f and z. c. f and s. d. v and t.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.5 Some Patterns are Easier to Learn than Others Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 31. Saffran and Thiessen’s 2003 study on pattern induction by infant language learners helped demonstrate that a. that babies quickly learn phonotactic constraints reflecting unnatural categories. b. testing requires use of real, not artificial, languages. c. babies do not start life with any bias for certain kinds of statistical regularities in the sounds of speech. d. evidence for learning biases in favor of natural patterns of language.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 4.5 Some Patterns are Easier to Learn than Others Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 32. The different pronunciation of the plural marker –s in the words dogs and cats illustrates which type of sound pattern? a. One feature of a sound affects the same feature of a neighboring sound. b. One feature of a sound affects a different feature of a neighboring sound. c. One feature of a sound affects the same feature several syllables over. d. One feature of a sound affects a different feature several syllables over.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 4.5 Some Patterns are Easier to Learn than Others Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 33. Dupoux et al.’s 1999 research showed that native speakers of a certain language insert illusory sounds to change syllable sequences that are “illegal” in their language to a legal sequence. These findings illustrate the power of a. the sonority sequencing principle. b. phonotactic expectations. c. dissimilation processes. d. unnatural patterns.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 4.5 Some Patterns are Easier to Learn than Others Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 34. Refer to the graph to answer this question.

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This graph illustrates sensitivity to the sonority sequencing principle in different languages.

These findings suggest that a. phonotactic constraints are learned. b. some languages feature stronger phonotactic constraints than others. c. there are universal biases for certain phonotactic constraints. d. speakers of different languages have different perceptions of the same sounds.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 4.5 Some Patterns are Easier to Learn than Others Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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Short Answer 1. How do researchers use head-turning behavior to identify differences in babies’ perception of familiar and novel words?

Answer: If an infant produces different head-turning behaviors for novel versus familiar words, researchers can conclude that the infant is treating those two types of stimuli differently. In the analysis of the head-turn behavior, researchers compare the average amount of time infants look at familiar versus novel stimuli. If the difference is significant, then the results indicate that the infants can detect a difference between the two types of stimuli. Examples of differential activity may include turning of the head toward one or another location where the sound is being presented or the length of time that a child orients toward the location of a novel or familiar sound.

Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. Discuss how Jusczyk and Aslin’s 1995 methodology allowed them to investigate infants’ abilities to perceive word breaks in sentences. Do the results indicate that infants have this capability? Explain.

Answer: Jusczyk and Aslin presented infants with a set of sentences containing a target word.

They were exposed to that word in the context of a sentence, with no specific indication of the word’s importance. When they were later presented with the target word in isolation, infants demonstrated that they were familiar with it, and not to test words they had not heard before in the familiarization phase. The methods and outcome of the experiment demonstrate that infants have some way of encoding specific components of fluid speech and retaining those components outside the context of the sentences in which they were presented. This is because, if infants had been unable to parse out the target word from each sentence, they wouldn’t have shown familiarity toward that word when it was later presented in isolation.

Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 3. Jusczyk and Aslin (1995) found that babies as young as 6 months of age could not segment words in sentences, whereas Bortfeld (2005) found that they could. How would you account for this difference?

Answer: In Jusczyk and Aslin’s study, babies were habituated to critical words during a familiarization phase in which sentences that included the target word were played for the infants. During the test phase, infants showed a preference for words that they had heard during the familiarization phase only after they were 7.5 months old. In Bortfeld’s study, the words babies used as cues for segmentation were ones that they had been hearing all the months of their lives, such as their own names or the word mommy. Thus, when segmentation was based on familiar anchor words, infants could parse nearby target words as young as 6 months. This may account for the much younger age at which babies were able to demonstrate segmentation abilities.

Textbook Reference: 4.1 Where are the words?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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4. Illustrate how Saffran et al.’s 1996 experiments demonstrated that 8-month-olds can segment completely novel speech that does not contain any clues such as intonation or phonotactic information.

Answer: Saffran et al. (1996) found that, when presented with a long stream of syllables from an artificial language that lacked intonation or phonotactic information about word breaks, infants will demonstrate recognition of repeated sequences of syllables. This finding demonstrates that, based on the statistical likelihood with which specific syllables cluster together, babies form a perception that these strings are related and respond to them as if they were single words. Infants showed longer looking times for sequences of syllables that had appeared in the 2-minute stream straddling a word boundary than for sequences that made up a complete “word” in the artificial language. This suggests that they were distinguishing between groups of syllables that made up a word in that novel language and groups of syllables that did not.

Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 5. Refer to the figure.

Based on the results in the table, what can you conclude about the ability of an 8-month-old to detect words presented to him during the familiarization phase?

Answer: The results demonstrate a difference in the amount of time infants fixated on words versus part-words, indicating that the infants were segmenting words from the stream of artificial language stimuli they heard during the two-minute presentations of artificial words streams. This occurs even though the words presented during the familiarization phase did not contain information about segmentation, such as pauses or intonations, or any useful information related to phonotactic patterns.

Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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6. Refer to the figure.

Hauser et al. (2001) conducted an experiment with tamarin monkeys that was very similar to Saffran et al.’s 1996 study investigating transitional probabilities. They found that after listening to a 20-minute stream of words from the same artificial language studied by Saffran et al., the tamarins oriented to a speaker more often when it played sequences of syllables that straddled a word boundary than when it played a sequence of syllables that made up a complete word.

Compare this finding to the results reported by Saffran et al. (see Figure 4.2). What do these results suggest about the use of statistical cues for segmenting words?

Answer: Like the human babies, the tamarin monkeys showed that they could distinguish between “words” and “non-words” after hearing a continuous stream of words in a language they had never heard before (although the tamarins were exposed to a longer sample than the babies).

This suggests that both tamarins and human infants can use statistical properties in speech to learn which syllables cluster together into word-like units. Because tamarins do not use language, and presumably have not evolved skills that are specific to language, the similarity between humans and tamarins suggests that this statistical ability reflects a general cognitive ability rather than one that evolved specifically for language.

Textbook Reference: 4.2 Infant Statisticians Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 7. Design a simple experiment that could demonstrate the phonemic restoration effect.

Answer: To evaluate the phonemic restoration effect, you would record someone speaking a word, such as telephone, and replace the phoneme /f/ with a non-speech sound, such as a cough.

Repeat this procedure with other multi-syllabic words, where a central phoneme is replaced by a non-speech sound. Once you have a short list of these words recorded, play each word for a

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participant and ask them to report what they hear. They should say that they hear the “replacement” sound as well as the phoneme that would have been present if the word were intact. Because the non-speech “replacement” sounds must share some acoustic properties with the speech sounds they are replacing in order to be heard as such, it would be wise to try a variety of non-speech sounds as replacements—for example, sneezes, claps, etc.

Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 8. Identify and describe the major dimensions of speech sound distinctions.

Answer: The major dimensions of speech sound distinctions are the place of articulation—the location above the larynx where airflow passing through the vocal tract is blocked partially or completely; the manner of articulation—the way in which the airflow is blocked; and voicing— whether and when the vocal cords are vibrating as a person utters a sound.

Textbook Reference: 4.3 What Are the Sounds?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 9. In Jusczyk et al.’s 1999 study, the researchers reported that 10.5-month-olds detected the phonetic difference between night rate and nitrates. Using the principle of assimilation, describe how infants are able to make this distinction.

Answer: Assimilation is the alteration of one sound to make it more similar to an adjacent phoneme. Because assimilation is stronger between sounds that occur next to each other within a word than between sounds that are separated by a word boundary, night rates and nitrates are usually pronounced slightly differently. In the case of nitrates, the sound of the /t/ is formed as a different allophone than the /t/ in night because it is assimilating to the sound of the adjacent /r/.

The greater degree of assimilation evident in nitrates relative to night rates may help to signal to the infants that there is a word boundary in the latter but not the former.

Textbook Reference: 4.4 Learning How Sounds Pattern Bloom’s Level: 2. Applying 10. Describe what a backward transitional probability (TP) is and provide an example. Explain how an infant might use this information to decide if the word baby is a noun.

Answer: A backward TP reflects the probability that a particular unit (word or syllable) precedes a given unit. For example, there is a high probability that the word the will precede the word baby, whereas the likelihood that the will precede the word eat is very low, as the almost never precedes eat. These probabilities may be helpful clues for figuring out that nouns, like baby or umbrella, belong to a different category than verbs, like eat or play. A baby may figure out that the word the has often preceded other nouns in the past, therefore, given that umbrella is also often preceded by the, it must be a noun. This process occurs implicitly as the baby is exposed to spoken language.

Textbook Reference: 4.4 Learning How Sounds Pattern Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 11. Explain how artificial languages are used to uncover possible learning biases.

Answer: In these studies, subjects are exposed to an artificial language that includes both highly typical patterns and also unusual patterns that are not typically found in most languages.

Different subjects are exposed to different patterns, but all subjects are exposed to the same

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“dose” of their pattern. Then, the subjects are tested to see how quickly they learned their pattern. Differences in how quickly subjects learn natural and unnatural patterns suggest possible bias.

Textbook Reference: 4.5 Some Patterns Are Easier to Learn than Others Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 12. Explain what constitutes a natural grouping of sounds as opposed to less natural one.

Answer: The most natural groupings of sounds are those that are defined by a single property.

Groupings that involve two or more properties become progressively less natural as more properties are included.

Textbook Reference: 4.5 Some Patterns Are Easier to Learn than Others Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 5: Learning Words Multiple Choice 1. When children begin to learn about word–object relationships, they usually learn this information when their parents a. speak to them using phrases or sentences about the object. b. utter one-word labels for objects. c. try to elicit cued responses as they point to the object. d. place the objects in the children’s hands as they name the object.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. Human natural languages seem to follow a duality of patterning, meaning that a. there is a direct translation for each idea from one language to another. b. sounds have the capacity to represent a wide variety of syntactic options and meanings. c. sounds combine into small meaningful units called morphemes, and those small units can combine into still larger phrases and sentences, conveying even more complex information. d. we are all capable of learning any language, given the right environment for encoding.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 3. What occurs when a baby has become habituated to an auditory stimulus? a. After repeated pairings of a visual and auditory stimulus, a baby spends more time orienting toward a visual stimulus when its auditory complement is heard. b. After repeated presentations of the same auditory stimulus, the baby spends less time orienting toward that stimulus when it is played again, than it did during past presentations of the same stimulus. c. After repeated pairings of a visual and auditory stimulus, a baby no longer orients at all toward either stimulus when either is presented again. d. The baby is captivated by the auditory stimuli whenever it is presented.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 4. Refer to the figure, in which the blue bars represent “same” trials and the red bars represent “switch” trials.

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What is the best interpretation of Stager and Werker’s 1997 data, represented by the four bars in the graph? a. Children have a difficult time realizing that two different auditory stimuli mean different things if the phonetic distinction between them is minimal. b. Children have a difficult time realizing that two different auditory stimuli mean different things if the phonetic distinction between them is large. c. Children reliably map different auditory stimuli onto different meanings regardless of whether the stimuli sound very similar or very different. d. Mean looking times cannot be used to describe how children map meaning onto sound information.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 5. Based on the results of Stager and Werker’s 1997 study, which two words would a 14-monthold child be most likely to understand as having two different meanings? a. stone/loan b. foam/moan c. lame/blame d. belt/rump Answer: d Textbook Reference: 5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 6. Evidence for similarity between adults’ and children’s lexical representation for sound and meaning is supported by White et al.’s 2013 study, using an artificial language, where a. adults had difficulty distinguishing between novel words like blook when they were similar to already learned words, such as klook.

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b. adults had no difficulty distinguishing between novel words like blook when they were similar to already learned words, such as klook. c. children around 14 months of age had no difficulty distinguishing between novel words like blook and similar sounding already learned words, such as klook. d. children around 14 months of age had difficulty distinguishing between novel words like blook and similar sounding already learned words, such as klook.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 7. Based on the research of Kellman and Spelke (1983), which scenario would be most likely? a. Pascal, a 3-month old, is surprised to see that two legs, protruding from behind a curtain and moving together, belong to two different toy squirrels, when the curtain is removed. b. Kasie, a 4-month old, is surprised to see that two legs, protruding from behind a curtain and moving together, belong to the same toy squirrel, when the curtain is removed. c. Denis, a 9-month old, does not recognize that the word rabbit refers to the entire animal; rather he thinks it only refers to the animal’s ears. d. Mari, a 4-month old, does not show surprise when a dog passes through a wall on a computer monitor in front of her.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 8. If you were a researcher testing a 12-month-old, which of the following would you expect the child to be able to recognize as a whole object? a. One of two separate and partially hidden shapes that move together b. A shape that they have previously seen only in pieces c. A shape that they have previously seen in two parts as well as together d. A shape that they have previously seen embedded in a whole object Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 9. Which training technique would best help Timmy, a 12-month-old, to associate the word puzzle with a collection of puzzle pieces as well as the completed puzzle? a. Have Timmy watch as another researcher attempts to put the puzzle together as they refer to the pieces using the word puzzle. b. Show Timmy the puzzle pieces, let him play with them and continue to use the word puzzle throughout the process. c. Show Timmy the word puzzle as well as a picture of the puzzle and point to both as you say the word puzzle. d. Show Timmy the completed puzzle as well as the process of completing the puzzle while talking about the object/objects as a puzzle.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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10. Which of the following is the best example of a basic-level category? a. Of the words wingtips, shoes, flip-flops; flip-flops is a basic-level category. b. Of the words shoes, shirts, wardrobe; wardrobe is a basic-level category. c. Of the words dog, terrier, and mammal; dog is a basic-level category. d. Of the words lion, tiger, and mammal; mammal is a basic-level category.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 11. In terms of babies’ category formation, an example of over-extension would be a. only referring to a daisy as a flower. b. calling all round objects a ball. c. referring to any large-eared animal as a hat. d. referring to any adult as a grown-up.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 12. Due to lack of experience with specific objects or situations, babies may refer to objects using subordinate-level categories such as a. calling all cars Jeeps. b. calling all apples fruit. c. calling all four-legged creatures animals. d. calling human children and toy dolls babies.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 13. Which example indicates that a child has assigned an object to a superordinate level category? a. George points to a cow and says “horse.” b. Nicola identifies a rose correctly from among a bunch of flowers. c. Svieta picks up her dog and says “poodle.” d. Carlos calls his action figure a toy.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 14. Which situation would be most likely to lead a young child to conclude that the word ball can be interpreted as a new basic-level category? During a study, the researcher uses the word ball to refer to a. a soccer ball. b. a group of toys that included a doll, a truck, and a ball. c. a collection of balls, including a tennis ball, beach ball, and basketball. d. pictures of a Dalmatian and of a baseball.

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Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 15. Refer to the images shown.

This ASL sign for cat illustrates the concept of a. mutual exclusivity. b. onomatopoeia. c. iconicity. d. superordinate-level categories.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 16. Some words, like the Czech word lítost, have extremely abstract and subtle meanings. What is the most likely explanation for how children are able to learn such words? a. Parents or teachers provide children with a detailed definition of such words.

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b. Children are guided by the expectation that, in any language, there is a fixed set of meanings that require a label. c. Children learn their meanings by being exposed to many contexts in which such words are appropriate. d. Children learn their meanings because parents make their referential intentions clear.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 17. Which example does not support the mutual exclusivity bias? a. When shown a picture of a hammer and asked what it is, a child responds “hammer,” but is unable to generate another name for the object, such as tool or weapon. b. When shown a picture of a hammer, and asked to provide as many words to name it as possible, a child calls it a hammer and a tool. c. When asked to provide her mother’s name, the child says “Mommy” but does not provide her parent’s actual name. d. When shown an apple and a fruit he has never seen before, a child assumes that the novel word zaf refers to the new fruit.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 18. Based on Baldwin and colleagues 1993 and 1996 studies on associative learning in very young children, in which scenario would a child be most likely to learn that a round object is a ball? a. Jakob is allowed to play with both a toy truck and a ball, as he hears the words truck and ball over a loudspeaker. b. Jakob watches as an older child plays with a ball and a truck, while occasionally using the word ball. c. Jakob is given a round object to play with as the word ball is played over a loud speaker. d. While Jakob is playing with a toy truck, he hears a researcher say, “this is a ball” as the researcher directs his attention to the object in the researcher’s hand, which is a round object.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 5.3 Understanding Speakers’ Intentions Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 19. Based on a study of speaker intent (Baron-Cohen, Baldwin, & Crowson, 1997), a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) would have a difficult time mapping meaning onto an object if a. a speaker is naming an object they are looking at, instead of one that the child is looking at. b. a speaker does not emphasize the object’s name in a sentence. c. the speaker does not describe what the object is used for to the child. d. the speaker is turning away from the child as he names the object.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.3 Understanding Speakers’ Intentions Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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20. With respect to word mapping, high-functioning children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have a. a difficult time making sense of spoken language. b. no difficulty learning to map words onto objects. c. a difficult time understanding the intentions of others. d. no difficulty in tracking where others are orienting.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.3 Understanding Speakers’ Intentions Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 21. If a child hears an adult say “bear” and point at a basketball several times, the child would a. start to also label the object bear. b. attach an insignificant amount of evidence that the object is a bear and still learn the object is a ball. c. attach an significant amount of evidence that the object is a bear and call it a bear until he or she has receives sufficient correction. d. label the object a ball because of its ball-like features.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.3 Understanding Speakers’ Intentions Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 22. Research on the linguistic interactions between robots and young children would predict that Sonny, an 18-month-old, would a. be able to follow the gaze of a robot as it “looked” at a ball with its mechanical eyes. b. learn that a round object is called a ball if a robot oriented its mechanical gaze at the object while simultaneously playing the pre-recorded word ball. c. learn that a round object is a ball if his mom was holding the ball for Sonny while the robot played the pre-recorded word ball. d. not orient toward a robot.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.3 Understanding Speakers’ Intentions Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 23. Which phrase contains a transitive verb? a. Beto coughed. b. Sarah danced on the stage. c. Jamal waved excitedly. d. John kissed Sarah.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 5.4 Parts of Speech Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 24. Which phrase contains an intransitive verb? a. John gave Sarah a ring. b. John kissed Sarah. c. Jiao wants an apple.

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d. Marina coughed.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 5.4 Parts of Speech Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 25. are sentence frames that help identify the number of objects or participants involved in the event or situation described by a sentence. a. Information structures b. Argument structures c. Verbal structures d. Linguistic structures Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.4 Parts of Speech Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 26. Based on the outcome of Hart and Risley’s 1995 study, which conclusion is not valid? a. Children growing up in poor households tend to have smaller vocabularies than children growing up in privileged homes. b. A child who is exposed to less language in childhood is more likely to have difficulties learning to read, regardless of the parents’ education levels. c. Children of parents with very low levels of education can have large vocabularies if they are exposed to a great deal of language at home. d. A child growing up in a poor household hearing a great deal of language will likely have a smaller vocabulary than a child from a privileged household who is exposed to less language.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.5 The Role of Language Input Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 27. A child growing up in a bilingual Spanish/English environment a. knows more words overall but fewer in each language. b. knows fewer words overall, leading to lower school performance. c. learns each language more slowly than a monolingual child. d. experiences a long-term lag in acquisition of dominant language skills.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.5 The Role of Language Input Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 28. According to the concept of contingency, you can enhance the quality of input received by a child by a. simply increasing the number of words you use in the presence of the child. b. connecting the child’s actions and words to a response in real-time. c. providing many opportunities for the child to overhear conversation taking place between others. d. increasing the number of people who provide input to the child.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.5 The Role of Language Input

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Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 29. Which one of these might be considered a feature of referential transparency? a. The sound a train makes b. A parent pointing at a passing train and saying, “Look at how long the train is!” c. A parent pointing at a passing train and saying, “Oh no, we’re going to be late!” d. The shape and movement of the train Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.5 The Role of Language Input Bloom’s Level: Applying 30. Which word contains more than one morpheme? a. Verve b. Wench c. Reface d. Stash Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 31. An example of an inflectional affix is a. -ed in worked. b. pre- in prevail. c. a- in apolitical. d. -ly in strangely.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 32. Derivational affixes help us transform categories of words; which addition is an example of such a transformation? a. Adding -ed to move b. Adding -ful to joy c. Adding -ing to run d. Adding -s to walk Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 33. Jean Berko Gleason’s 1958 study is hailed as a pivotal investigation into children’s wordform use. Based on her results, what prediction would you make about how complex word forms are learned by children of the same age as those in the study? a. Upon hearing the word foot for the first time, a child will incorrectly guess that the plural of foot is foots. b. Upon hearing the word foot for the first time, a child will correctly guess that the plural of foot is feet.

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c. A child will not be able to correctly produce the plural form of a regular noun like figs without hearing the correct plural form at least once. d. In guessing the plural form of nouns like hand and tooth, a child will be equally likely to make errors with regular forms like hands and irregular forms like teeth unless she has heard these plural forms before.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 34. A child who, at an early age, used irregular verb forms correctly (using grow and its past tense grew) suddenly began using growed instead of grew. This child a. is regressing to a more comfortable state instead of learning to abstract the rules of grammar. b. is extracting the rules for how to form tenses and applying those generalizations to words that seem similar. c. has had an inadequate amount of parental input into the language learning process. d. needs more intense educational programs to learn the rules of grammar.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 35. As a neurolinguist, you would predict that a patient with Alzheimer’s disease would have more trouble retrieving the past-tense verb than would a patient suffering from Parkinson’s disease. a. kicked b. baked c. brought d. helped Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 36. Rumelhart and McClelland’s 1986 connectionist model would suggest that the best way to teach a young child the proper forms of regular and irregular verbs would be a. rote memorization, where the child is presented with both regular and irregular verbs and is encouraged to memorize each set. b. through mere exposure to language containing vast amounts of both types of verbs and their various forms. c. to practice speaking with a parent, where the parent corrects the child every time the child uses an incorrect verb form. d. to wait for the child to enter kindergarten where specialized teaching techniques are employed to teach children the correct forms of verbs.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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37. describes what happens over time when a specialized word, for example a brand name, becomes a commonplace and universal term for a category of things, such as using BandAid to describe a sticky, plastic wound covering. a. Analogy b. Marketability c. Generality d. Genericide Answer: d Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 38. If 2-month-old infants can assign objects to different categories without knowing those objects’ names, then you would predict that at this age, an infant would a. spend more time staring at an image of a horse than an image of dog during a test phase, after having seen a large number of various dog images during a prior habituation phase. b. spend the same about the amount of time staring at an image of a horse as an image of dog during the test phase, after having seen a large number of only dog images during a habituation phase. c. not recognize that a favorite stuffed bear toy was replaced by a similar stuffed kitty toy. d. spend more time looking at a familiar stuffed bear toy than a new, similar kitty toy.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 39. After reading the findings of Xu and Carey (1996), you decide to test 9-month-old Charlie, whom you regularly babysit. First you bring a toy horse from behind a screen then hide it again, and then you bring a drum from behind the screen then hide it again. When you remove the screen that hid the toys, Charlie will be surprised if a. only the drum is revealed. b. two totally different toys are revealed. c. you named each toy as it appeared, but only the horse is revealed. d. you named each toy as it appeared and both toys are revealed.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Short Answer 1. Describe how the switch task is used to evaluate how babies map meaning onto the sounds contained in their language and what it tells us about infants’ long-term memory storage.

Answer: The switch task presents babies with pairs of images and words (usually ones that are made up) over a number of trials. Once a baby is habituated to each image–word pair, a test phase takes place in which the original image is paired either with the original word or with a different word. Researchers then evaluate how long the babies gaze at the image when it is paired with the habituated word compared to a different word. If gaze duration differs between the two conditions, this indicates that the first word was linked to the image in long-term memory. Longer looking times when the novel word is paired with the image suggests surprise or confusion, indicating that it was not expected by the baby.

Textbook Reference: 5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. Refer to the figure shown. The blue bar represents the “same” trial and the red bar represents the “switch” trial.

The figure refers to the Stager and Werker’s 1997 study, in which researchers used the switch task with children 14 months or older. What does the bar graph suggest about children’s ability to associate meaning with auditory stimuli?

Answer: The two bars on the right show that, in the test phase, the babies spent more time looking at an image if it was accompanied by a new word (neem) than if it was accompanied by the same word that had been used in the habituation phase (lif). This suggests that the babies had taken lif to be meaningfully related to the image, and were surprised when the image was then paired with a different word. In contrast, the two bars on the left indicate no difference in gaze duration when the auditory stimuli were very similar in both conditions. Even though babies are able to encode distinct pairs of visual-auditory stimuli, the fact that there is no difference in the

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

looking times for bih and dih suggests that infants are treating the two similar words as if they are the same.

Textbook Reference: 5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 3. Based on the research in Chapter 5, how would you go about making sure that a 9-month-old child learns the names of objects that are made up of several parts (e.g., box for a box with a bottom and a lid, flute for a flute whose parts screw together, pen for a pen with a cap).

Specifically, how would the child avoid thinking that words like box or pen refer to just the lid or the cap?

Answer: Based on Hollich et al.’s 2007 study, children would need to see that the parts go together to make a single object. Once they have evidence for this, learning the names of objects that are made of several parts doesn’t pose a problem for their language learning because children expect that a label refers to the entire object, rather than just a part of it. For example, as soon as they have seen that the lid fits together with the bottom of the box to make a single object, if they hear the word box, they will assume that it refers to the whole box rather than a part of it.

Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 4. Defend the argument that babies are able to recognize that components of objects are related to a whole by citing empirical evidence described in the chapter.

Answer: Kellman and Spelke (1983) found that babies are able to identify when partially occluded object parts should be part of one unit based on the movement of those parts. In this study, infants watched as two sticks, poking out from behind a screen, moved in unison. When the screen was removed, babies stared longer at the two sticks if they were separate entities than if they were connected as a single object. Also, Hollich et al.’s 2007 study showed that infants were capable of recognizing that words apply to whole objects comprised of subcomponents when they were shown that the objects could be broken down and built from smaller pieces.

Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 5. Refer to the figure.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

For each set of images, describe some of the challenges that children are faced with in deciding which features to use to form an understanding of which objects the names apple and present apply to.

Answer: Shape is a useful cue for category membership, and in the case of apple, it would help children distinguish an apple from a banana. But given that oranges have a similar shape to apples, and that apples are sometimes presented in sliced form, children would also have to pay attention to other cues—for example, whether it can be eaten with its peel on, or its taste and texture. This suggests that they would need some detailed experience with these various objects.

The challenge is even greater for present. Some visible features, like a bow, could be helpful in identifying presents. But bows can appear on things that aren’t presents, like children, and not all presents have a bow. Here, the child would need to learn to pay attention to very abstract cues, such as whether the object is given by one person to another as a pleasant surprise.

Textbook Reference: 5.2 Reference and Concepts Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 6. Baldwin et al. (1996) used auditory paired association to investigate children’s word mapping.

In their study the researchers played a word through a loudspeaker while the child played with a toy. What do the results of the study tell us about how children learn the names of objects?

Answer: Baldwin and colleagues showed that children do not rely completely on mere associative learning when encoding meaning onto objects. In their 1996 study, the researchers played a word through a loudspeaker while the child played with a toy, but there was no one to direct the child to the sound or indicate that the sound related to the toy. During the testing phase, when asked to pick out a toy called by the same name as the child had heard through the loudspeaker, the child did not pick the toy they had been playing with, indicating that the mere exposure to the name of an object does not necessarily lead to a pairing between the word and the object.

Textbook Reference: 5.3 Understanding Speakers’ Intentions Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 7. Defend the statement: “Associative learning does not entirely explain how children map words onto objects.” Provide an example of empirical evidence in your argument.

Answer: Answers may vary; several examples are provided: In addition to merely presenting children with objects and naming those objects in their presence, it is also important to represent the speaker’s intentions and convince children that the speaker is a reliable source and is referring to a specific object. a) For example, in a study by Baldwin et al. (1996), children heard a word through a loudspeaker while playing with a toy; however, there was no one to indicate that the sound related to the toy.

During the test phase, when asked to pick out a toy called by the same name as the child had heard through the loudspeaker, the child did not choose the toy they had been playing with. In contrast, in a separate study by Baldwin (1993), when a physically present adult named a toy, the children did apply that name to the toy that the adult was looking at and drew their attention to, even though the child had been paying attention to a different toy at the time the word was spoken. b) For example, Tomasello and Barton (1994) had an experimenter search for an object, wondering aloud where the “toma” could be. If the experimenter produced an excited response

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

when the toma was found, children learned the name of that object just watching that scene unfold, even though the name was not uttered at the time that either the child’s or the adult’s attention was directed at that toy. c) For example, Koenig and Woodward (2010) found that if children interacted with a speaker who produced incorrect names for objects (e.g., referring to a shoe with the word duck), children were reluctant to map names for new objects provided by such unreliable speakers. They were more successful at learning names for new objects when they were provided by speakers who had correctly produced the names of familiar objects.

Textbook Reference: 5.3 Understanding Speakers’ Intentions Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 8. Gillette et al. (1999) exposed college students to several silent videos with a beep in the middle. What were their key findings? How does nonlinguistic context interact with spoken verbs? What does this research imply about the information we use to learn verbs?

Answer: The researchers had college students guess which common verbs were being uttered by parents to their toddlers as they watched silent videos of parental interactions with toddlers, with beeps indicating when the critical word was uttered. Adult students were especially poor at guessing which verbs were being spoken by the parents. This suggests that there is not enough information in the nonlinguistic context alone for learners to infer the correct meanings of verbs.

A key component necessary for learning the meanings of verbs seems to be their linguistic context. In English, some helpful cues signaling that a word is a verb might include word endings such as -ing, -ed, or -es. Cues that might help a learner infer the specific meanings of verbs in context include the syntactic frames that accompany verbs, such as whether or not a verb takes a direct object.

Textbook Reference: 5.4 Parts of Speech Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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

Answer: Linguistic input is all the information that a child is exposed to, whereas her linguistic intake is the information that she actually interprets correctly. We do not know the full extent of a child’s intake based on the input she receives. If there is a large gap between the input and intake, the child’s ability to learn from certain types of sentences may be severely hindered.

Textbook Reference: 5.5 The Role of Language Input Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 10. Based on the results of Hart and Risley’s 1995 study about the number of words children hear on average per hour, describe the ideal conditions for a child’s vocabulary and linguistic development and why that matters.

Answer: Hart and Risley (1995) found that the number of words that a child hears per hour in their home seems to be correlated with the socioeconomic and educational status of his or her parents and, more importantly, is later correlated with the child’s cumulative vocabulary as they age. In an ideal situation, exposing a child to as much child-directed speech as possible during their first few years of development would help them to accumulate a larger vocabulary and also potentially aid with the process of learning to read.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 5.5 The Role of Language Input Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 11. Why do we treat pastry chef as a single word unit, even though it appears to be composed of the two words pastry and chef, separated by a space? Explain your answer by comparing it to the word chef, which is very obviously a single word.

Answer: Although pastry chef is a complex noun made up of two individual nouns, it functions in a sentence just like a simple noun such as chef. For example, it can occupy the same slot in the sentence as chef, as in the following examples: The incompetent chef was fired./The incompetent pastry chef was fired. Furthermore, to form a plural with pastry chef, you would have to add the morpheme –s to the end of the whole unit to make pastry chefs; it would be impossible to add a plural marker to pastry—the phrase pastries chef is ungrammatical— suggesting that when it is part of the complex word pastry chef, pastry is not acting like a separate word in its own right.

Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 12. How would you describe and explain the relationship between phonemes, morphemes, and affixes, using the word cat as an example?

Answer: Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in our language and do not carry meaning.

Morphemes are the smallest units of sound in our language that carry meaning. For example, the word cat has three phonemes: /c/, /a/, and /t/, whereas it only has one morpheme: cat, because cat cannot be broken down further and still have meaning. Affixes are types of morphemes that cannot stand alone but help to change words so they can better fit into sentences. For example, you would not say The three cat jumped over the fence, but you would add a suffix –s to cat, (a type of affix added to the end of a word) and the sentence would now read “The three cats jumped over the fence.”

Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 13. Did Jean Berko Gleason’s famous 1958 study, using bluebird-like creatures called wugs, show that young children are able to generalize rules of grammar to novel words? Why or why not? Support your answer.

Answer: Yes, the study did demonstrate that young children were able to correctly assign a suffix to a novel word so that it accurately described a multiple of that word. The results indicate that young children, when given novel names for objects, were able to tack on the correct suffixes to the names of those objects when presented with multiple exemplars of them. For example, when shown an image of a creature called a wug, children were able to extrapolate that more than one exemplar would be wugs, demonstrating their use of previously learned word suffixes in novel situations.

Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 14. How does Rumelhart and McClelland’s 1986 connectionist model attempt to explain how children learn the proper forms of both regular and irregular verbs?

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Answer: The model suggests that children extract statistical information about phonetic similarities between verb tenses and that both regular and irregular verbs are evaluated based on exposure to and familiarity with many exemplars. The researchers claim that, over time, children are able to make generalizations about which sounds are found together, even in irregular verb patterns, and apply those to novel words that contain similar sounds and organizations of letters.

Textbook Reference: 5.6 Complex Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

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Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 6: Learning the Structure of Sentences Multiple Choice 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: b Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 2. Refer to the table.

Brown’s table demonstrates that a child of the age of

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

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: c Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 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: b Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 4. illustrates a compositional relationship between words whereas example of a non-compositional compound. a. Basketball; field mouse b. Stonewall; wide-mouth bass

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is an

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

c. Game face; stun gun d. Hot bath; parkway Answer: d Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 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 Answer: c Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 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 Answer: d Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 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.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 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.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

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] Answer: b Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 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.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 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.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 12. According to researcher Dan Everett, the Pirahã people of the Amazon lack a. universal grammar. b. syntax. c. recursion. d. constituents.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 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.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

d. lexical items are constructed first then guided by syntax, or syntax guides lexical selection.

Answer: a.

Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 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.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 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.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 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.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 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.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

d. recognize that words with similar phonetic patterns tend to belong to the same category, for example that plane and plate are both nouns.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 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.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 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.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 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.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 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.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

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 Answer: c Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 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.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 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.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 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 Answer: d Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

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.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 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.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 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 Answer: c Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 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 Answer: c Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 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.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 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 Answer: c Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 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.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 6.5 What Do Children Do With Input?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Short Answer 1. Define and relate semantics and syntax. Provide an example of how changing the syntax can change the meaning of a sentence.

Answer: Semantics relates to the meaning carried by words, phrases, and sentences and the rules that govern how meaning is extracted from language. Syntax refers to the rules that determine how words are organized into grammatical sentences in a given language. Because the meaning of complex units, like phrases or sentences, depends on their structure, changing the syntax of a sentence can greatly affect the meaning of that sentence. For example, in English, the noun phrase that precedes a verb in the active voice is typically understood as the entity initiating the action, whereas the noun phrase that follows the verb is understood as the entity that is acted upon. Thus, The cat bit the dog describes a very different event than The dog bit the cat.

Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 2. 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.

Answer: (Answers may vary, and an answer that addresses either of the following arguments may be considered complete.)

1) Characterizing language structure in terms of constituents allows us to capture important syntactic patterns. For example, consider the following sentences: She loves candy corn.

The little girl who lives down the street from me loves candy corn.

Here, [she] and [The little girl who lives down the street from me] occupy the same “slot” in the sentence and contribute to the sentence’s meaning in the same way. We can’t capture this relationship if we characterize each sentence as a string of words; however, this relationship becomes apparent if we identify both of these as examples of noun phrases. Noun phrases may be composed in a variety of ways, but they are syntactically interchangeable.

2) One sentence may be interpreted to have more than one meaning. For example, the sentence The farmer shot the burglar with a rifle can mean that the farmer used a rifle to shoot the burglar or that the burglar was holding a rifle. This difference in meanings can’t be captured if the sentence is described only it terms of its linear order. Structuring language hierarchically allows us to capture the fact that the same words can be grouped into constituents in different ways. In the first meaning, the phrase [with a rifle] is not part of the direct object [the burglar], whereas in the second meaning, [with a rifle] is part of the same constituent as [the burglar]. Since constituents represent cohesive units of structure that resist being broken up, this explains why the sentence With a rifle, the farmer shot the burglar can’t mean that the burglar was holding a rifle.

Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 3. 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.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Answer: (based on the rules provided in Box 6.2): [S [NP [Pro She]] [VP bought [NP [Det a] [N house] [PP [P with] [NP [Det a] [N yard ]]]]]] Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 4. Explain how language is generative, and provide an example.

Answer: Language is generative in that it allows us to create and understand a vast number of sentences by combining linguistic units in patterned ways. Our knowledge of these patterns helps us to make or understand completely new sentences without having to memorize them. For example, even if we have never seen or heard it before, we can understand a novel sentence such as The pink dog jumped over the striped barrel to lick the ear of my uncle’s lazy giraffe.

Textbook Reference: 6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 5. 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?

Answer: A trigram is a sequence of three words. Mintz showed that parents use predictable trigrams as frames for new words, such as the bounces. The word that falls in the center of such a frame can almost always be only one part of speech. For instance, in the frame above, whatever novel word falls in the middle of the trigram must be a noun. Therefore, parents are placing words in predictable positions so that children can identify what role (or part of speech) a new word is supposed to play in a sentence.

Textbook Reference: 6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 6. Refer to the figure.

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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?

Answer: Mintz familiarized infants to frequency frames where nonsense words represented either verbs or nouns inside trigrams (for example, She wants to deeg it; I see the gorp in the room).

During the testing phase, the infants’ looking times were measured as they listened to grammatical and ungrammatical versions of the trigrams. In ungrammatical versions, a nonsense noun was inserted in a trigram where a verb would have been appropriate. The graph demonstrates that infants were able to recognize when a lure word was used in the wrong frame, especially if a noun was placed in a trigram where a verb belonged (and only to a lesser extent the other way around). These results seem to support the idea that babies can detect distributional evidence about where a certain category of word belongs, and detect when something is wrong with the placement of words outside the bounds of syntactic rules they have observed.

Textbook Reference: 6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 7. 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?

Answer: A child might say something like Daddy laughed me, meaning, Daddy caused me to laugh. This form would be produced because of its similarity to grammatical English sentences like Mommy burned the toast, meaning Mommy caused the toast to burn. Overgeneralizations like these suggest that, rather than memorizing specific structures that are associated with individual verbs, children are learning general patterns and applying them to unfamiliar verbs.

Occasionally, they extend these patterns to verbs incorrectly, much as they might incorrectly generalize the regular plural form –s to an irregular noun, producing tooths instead of teeth.

Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 8. 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.

Answer: In relation to grammatical processing, the specific paths of brain activity in adults versus children indicated that children relied more heavily on the ventral pathways during a passive listening task where various grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli were presented than adults did. This may be due to the lack of mature myelination along the dorsal pathways in younger children; perhaps relying on ventral pathways in their evaluation of whether sentences they hear are grammatical is a compensatory mechanism. This suggests that even though children and adults may show similar linguistic performance, the methods used by the two groups to accomplish a similar task may differ.

Textbook Reference: 6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 9. 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?

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Answer: This sentence contains a relative clause: hiding under the tree. Research indicates that children with SLI are unlikely to attempt to produce relative clauses before the age of five and they have difficulty formulating them even when they are older. Instead a child with SLI might separate the two thoughts into individual sentences, saying something like The bear was hiding under the tree. It ran away.

Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 10. 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?

Answer: In forming the question, children have to know which occurrence of is must appear at the beginning of the question. In English, this must always be the one in the main clause, regardless of whether it is the first or second occurrence in the sentence. For example, this applies to the second occurrence of is in the first sentence, but the first occurrence of is in the second sentence. In learning how to form yes/no questions, children do not seem to make mistakes about which is appears in this position. This suggests that they are relying on structural concepts like main clause rather than on the linear order of words in formulating the rule for question formation.

Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 11. Do Bayesian models originate from the nativist or the data-driven perspective of language acquisition? Explain your answer.

Answer: Bayesian models consider children’s language acquisition from their position of current incoming information and how it relates to what they have experienced in the past. This is a fairly data-driven theory and assumes that children have a way of extracting and storing statistical information about language and comparing the current incoming signals to those which they have encountered in the past.

Textbook Reference: 6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 12. 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?

Answer: Sample answers include: What built-in constraints need to be in place if any, to learn sentence structure? What kind of language input is best for learning? What kind of learning best mimics patterns of real-life language development? Why do children exhibit stages of learning?

Does syntax need to interact with the lexicon or can a rule-based program account for similar results?

Textbook Reference: 6.5 What Do Children Do with Input?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

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

Answer: Linguistic input is all the information that a child is exposed to, whereas her linguistic intake is the information that she actually interprets correctly. We do not know the full extent of a child’s intake based on the input she receives. If there is a large gap between the input and intake, the child’s ability to learn from certain types of sentences may be severely hindered.

Textbook Reference: 6.5 What Do Children Do with Input?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Chapter 7: Speech Perception Multiple Choice 1. Which kind of sound contrast differs along the sound dimension that is called “manner of articulation”? a. Whether air is closed off between the two lips or near the glottis b. Whether flow is completely stopped or is only partially constricted by a narrowed passage somewhere in the vocal apparatus c. Whether or not the vocal folds vibrate d. A contrast caused by the relative height of the tongue during sound production Answer: b Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 2. Which sound contrasts differ in their place of articulation? a. /b/ vs. /p/ b. The /p/ in pool vs. in spool c. oo vs. ow d. /p/ vs. /k/ Answer: d Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 3. Which response is not a challenge engineers faced in designing automated speech recognition software? a. The stream of speech sounds proceeds without many silences, making it hard to decide when the signal has ended one word and begun the next word. b. Individual speakers vary widely in how they pronounce phonemes. c. Even a voice-activated toy dog must understand the meaning of individual words if it is to respond differently to each of them. d. Background noise overlaps with the kinds of sounds present in the speech signal, making it unclear which source produced which component of the sound stream.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 4. Which of the following adds nothing to variability between different instances of the same phoneme in speech? a. Differences in the vocal apparatus between men, women, and children speakers © 2019 Oxford University Press

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b. Morphemic content c. Coarticulation d. The allophones included in the spoken language Answer: b Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 5. Two or more similar sounds that are variants of the same phoneme are called a. allophones b. morphemes c. warped perceptions d. sorted phonemes Answer: a Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 6. Which speech-perception task would place the greatest demand on short-term memory (working memory)? a. A task in which a subject in an fMRI scanner passively listens to repeating syllable stimuli that sometimes change acoustically b. A task in which a subject is instructed to click on a computer image that matches a word they hear c. A forced-choice identification task d. An ABX discrimination task Answer: d Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 7. In a test for categorical perception, participants hear two sounds and are asked to say whether the sounds are the same phoneme or different phonemes. What have such tests found? a. Performance is poor at first, but listeners become more discerning between sounds with practice. b. Performance is poor despite large acoustic differences, as long as the sounds fall within the same phoneme category. c. Performance is better if the sounds are acoustically different and fall within the same phoneme category than it is if they come from different phoneme categories. d. Listeners can respond equally well to all sound differences but take more time to respond if the sounds come from the same phoneme category.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 8. Suppose researchers ask participants to identify syllables from a set of stimuli that were created such that they vary systematically by equal steps of difference in voice onset time. How well will the participants identify stimuli? a. Syllables are identified correctly only if they occur frequently in the language.

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b. Subjects will be unable to perceive syllables near the VOT boundary between phonemes. c. On either side of the phoneme boundary in VOT, subjects will consistently hear each syllable as a good example of one or the other phoneme. d. On either side of the phoneme boundary in VOT, subjects will guess the syllable at close to a chance level.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 9. How is categorical perception different from continuous perception? a. Some exemplars of a stimulus category are perceived as much better than others. b. Subjects respond equally well to any kind of change along a physical gradient. c. The proportion of identifications as one vs. another category of stimuli has a very steep slope around some boundary that is not based on physical differences. d. It involves a continuously updating perception.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 10. Which statement accurately describes a similarity or difference in the way acoustic speech and visual sign languages are perceived? a. Vocally produced sounds vary in several acoustic dimensions, whereas only the shape of a hand gesture matters in sign language. b. Experienced listeners of spoken language can ignore sound variations, whereas even those fluent in sign language never learn to ignore variation in hand shape. c. Speakers acquire the accent of their communities, whereas signers produce universally stereotyped hand movements and shapes no matter where they use sign language. d. There are no major differences—visual perception shares many principles with auditory perception, and both types of language function in an equally complex manner.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 11. is a clear example of how visual perception can influence how we hear speech. a. The McGurk effect b. Coarticulation c. The Ganong effect d. Complementary distribution Answer: a Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 12. Imagine that you were a participant in William Ganong’s 1980 study, and you were asked to report whether you heard the word bid or pid when presented with an ambiguous phoneme sound between /b/ and /p/ at the start of _id. You would a. be equally as likely to report hearing pid as bid.

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b. be more likely to report hearing pid than bid. c. be more likely to report hearing bid than pid. d. likely be unable to recognize which word you heard.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 13. The Ganong effect is to linguistic perceptual invariance as invariance. a. the uniqueness point b. implicit priming c. shape constancy d. color constancy Answer: d Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

is to visual perceptual

14. occurs when a participant reports hearing both the missing phoneme as well as the non-linguistic sound, such as a sneeze, that replaced it. a. The phoneme restoration effect b. Compensation for coarticulation c. A mondegreen d. Phonemic awareness Answer: a Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 15. What determines which sound features become prioritized as cues about sound category distinctions? a. Cues are weighted differently depending on the context, variability, talker, and language. b. The most salient features stay the same because the auditory system constrains perception. c. All cues are on equal footing as important dimensions of speech sounds. d. Voice-onset time is always prioritized over pitch because pitch has the additional functions of cuing speaker identity or prosody.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 16. When testing the perceptual effects of music training, why should a researcher use random assignment of participants to a musical group or control activity? a. Participants are usually equally glad to be assigned to any kind of activity. b. Otherwise, the direction of causation is questionable, since those in the music group may already have superior listening skills that made them more likely to want to play music. c. Random assignment makes the music group more diverse. d. Random assignment minimizes individual differences within each group, making the groups easier to reason about.

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Answer: b Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 17. Emily Myers (2009) performed fMRI brain imaging on subjects who were hearing and watching stimuli that produced the McGurk illusion. What aspects of the stimuli predicted selective brain activity? a. Neural responses during the McGurk effect are no different than during trials without the effect. b. Auditory neural regions represented the phonemic category rather than the acoustic gradient within it. c. Auditory neural regions represented any kind of perceptible acoustic change. d. Some neural regions responded selectively to an abstract sound category, whereas other neural regions responded selectively to acoustic details even within a category.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 18. When a 50-year-old man says the name Rex, he pronounces the vowel with a lot of intensity at 500 Hz. When a 7-year-old girl says the name Rex, she pronounces the vowel without a strong component in the frequency range around 500 Hz. You have no trouble hearing both of their speech as examples of the same word. This phenomenon is known as a. perceptual invariance. b. simultaneous activation of multiple word meanings. c. incremental language processing. d. crossmodal priming.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 7.3 Adapting to a Variety of Talkers Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 19. While researching a language that linguists have not catalogued before, you discover that there are very strong accents within it. In a paper presenting a hypothesis about the origin of the accents, you use Bill Labov’s research in the United States to corroborate your hypothesis. Your hypothesis is most likely: a. The inherited physical traits of each group’s vocal tracts lead them to produce slightly different sounds, giving them an accent. b. When people move into a new area, they develop an accent that propagates better in that environment, based on its acoustic features. c. Identifying with an esteemed, yet otherwise threatened, subset of the population can motivate speakers to signal that identity by an accent. d. Subsets of a population that value education less will acquire an accent out of sloppiness.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 7.3 Adapting to a Variety of Talkers Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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20. When dubbing a film into another language has been done very well, the sound team has taken advantage of which aspect of speech perception? a. You cannot tell, just by looking, how rounded or spread a speaker’s lips are held unless you have extensive familiarity with the speaker’s face and lips. b. The McGurk effect works only for vowels, so the soundtrack has more influence than the video image. c. Viewers take pride in their own language, so they tend to “see” it in all actor speech, especially when the actor is attractive. d. Voicing and tongue gestures are barely visible, or are invisible, meaning that the actor’s appearance is compatible with multiple phonemes.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 7.3 Adapting to a Variety of Talkers Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 21. Tasha is a spy who must interact regularly with people from many different parts of the world. Most of her contacts speak English, but they often have heavy accents that make communication difficult. What strategy should she use to become better at comprehending strangers with unfamiliar accents? a. She should go to subtitled foreign movies to absorb sounds without necessarily trying to comprehend them. b. She should seek accent-specific training, exposing herself to speakers of each new accents she might encounter. c. She should expose herself to a number of talkers who each have unique accent, thereby improving her skills at understanding all accents. d. She must try to obtain recordings of the actual individuals she hopes to be able to understand.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 7.3 Adapting to a Variety of Talkers Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 22. Judging from the psycholinguistic evidence, what is a benefit of raising a toddler with exposure to a variety of voices and vocal accents? a. The toddler will become a better speller. b. The toddler will distinguish words from nonsense words at a younger age. c. The toddler will grow up to be speak multiple languages. d. The toddler will be better at recognizing words spoken with many emotional tones.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 7.3 Adapting to a Variety of Talkers Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 23. What general cognitive skill may support adaptation to variations of the sound categories in speech? a. Managing attention to adjust the weights of multiple sound cues in speech b. Managing attention to think of how the sound really ought to be produced c. Refreshing working memory more often by forgetting recent exposures d. Actively perceiving every acoustic detail as if it might become relevant in identifying phonemes

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Answer: a Textbook Reference: 7.3 Adapting to a Variety of Talkers Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 24. Suppose an individual speaker consistently used VOT to distinguish between two phoneme categories (in her production of voiced vs. voiceless sounds) but was not consistent in cuing by means of the pitch at the beginning of the vowel that follows these sounds. What acoustic cue(s) will this individual then use to categorize voicing distinctions in speech sounds that she passively hears others produce? a. Pitch b. VOT c. Both VOT and pitch d. Some other cue Answer: c Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 25. What was the result when researchers used fMRI to image brain activity while subjects listened to syllables that differed in place of articulation? a. The motor region for lip movements was more active when hearing /p/, and the tongue movement area was more active when hearing /t/. b. The motor region for tongue movements was more active when hearing /p/, and the lip movement area was more active when hearing /t/. c. Brain activity during passive listening did not overlap with the brain regions active during speaking tasks. d. Upon hearing any speech sound, all the articulatory regions were activated at once, as predicted by the motor theory of speech perception.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 26. When is it most likely that articulatory knowledge of how speech sounds are made strongly helps speech perception? a. When Spanish students learning Basque as a foreign language start by trying to imitate sound contrasts that do not occur in Spanish b. When people are tasked with manipulating abstract categories of sound, requiring conscious effort c. When the speech sounds are quite familiar, so the participants know more about their production d. When the environment is quiet, so listeners can hear the more subtle sounds of jaw cartilage and mouth muscle movements Answer: b Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

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27. Why might a researcher be justified in wanting to use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)? a. If correctly targeted, TMS can generate auditory hallucinations of whatever speech sounds the researcher is interested in investigating. b. When “naturally occurring” damage interferes with brain activity, it often affects many brain regions beyond those the researcher can hypothesize about. c. The pulses of magnetic stimulation are totally reversible and will not affect the functioning of the brain after they are turned off. d. Brain disorders do not occur naturally in children during the ages when they are learning to produce speech.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 28. Why is it generally harder for individuals older than 70 to understand audible speech? a. Hearing loss, which is nearly universal in this age group, explains the major difficulties. b. There are so many redundant cues in speech that it confuses older listeners. c. Since their own muscles are slowed down, they stop understanding visual cues to lip-read. d. The processing of temporal auditory information can be impaired in older adults even when frequencies are reliably heard at low volumes.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 29. What would be the best stage name for a ventriloquist, in order to best support the illusion that the dummy is the one saying the name during the script? a. Bob, because the ventriloquist could simply substitute an altered /d/ for the /b/. b. Pip William, because it is long and with categorically perceived consonants. c. Henrietta, because it is long and the lips do not have to move. d. Famous Mave, because this name takes full advantage of the Ganong effect.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 30. In general, ventriloquists seem to use techniques and illusions that heavily rely on their audience’s processing of stimuli, where previous knowledge has a great influence on shaping perception. a. top-down b. bottom-up c. architectural d. crossmodal Answer: a Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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Short Answer 1. Suppose you are trying to automate the production of speech using computer software and a loudspeaker. Why would it fail to sound natural if your message was generated by splicing together exemplar phonemes that had been spoken one at a time in isolation on a recording?

Answer: Natural speech is subject to coarticulation effects—phonemes are affected by the shape of the mouth as it produces prior phonemes and anticipates future phonemes. Without these coarticulation effects, the phoneme spoken in isolation would sound inappropriate in many sequences of the phonemes in natural language.

Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating.

2. Refer to the figure.

If the figure refers to the categorical perception of /ba/ and /pa/, summarize how a person would interpret these sounds as the VOT changed for each.

Answer: With a VOT of less than 10 ms, the listener will always report hearing /ba/. With a VOT longer than 30 ms, the participant will always report hearing /pa/. As the VOT increases from 10 to 30 ms, a participant will be increasingly more likely to report hearing /pa/.

Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with Variability in Sounds Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 3. Refer to the figure.

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Based on the figure from Kuhl and Miller’s 1975 study of categorical perception in chinchillas, what can you conclude about humans’ and chinchillas’ abilities to detect sound boundaries and language?

Answer: Human subjects show categorical perception of stimuli that vary along the VOT continuum; that is, the same difference in VOT values between two stimuli is more readily perceived if the two stimuli straddle the phonemic boundary than if they do not. The figure shows that, when trained to be sensitive to extremely distinct sounds, chinchillas also produce a strong categorical perception effect. That is, the probability of distinguishing auditory stimuli followed a pattern that was remarkably similar to humans’ perceptual boundaries for the same stimuli. This suggests that categorical perception is not limited to species that use language, and hence, it does not appear to be a skill that evolved specifically for language use.

Textbook Reference: 7.1 Coping with Variability in Sounds Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 4. Describe examples of evidence that show how context can help a listener comprehend specific phonemes or syllables.

Answer: Answers may vary, but two examples are the Ganong effect and coarticulation.

The Ganong effect occurs when listeners construe an ambiguous sound token differently depending on whether it would complete a word or a non-word. For example, an ambiguous /b/ and /p/ will be perceived as /b/ in the context _ash but as /p/ in the context _ant. Coarticulation refers to when pronunciation of a phoneme is affected by those coming just before or after the phoneme. Listeners use experience-driven knowledge about coarticulation to categorize phonemes according to how the vocal apparatus tends to linger on (or anticipate) neighboring sounds.

Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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5. Describe the McGurk effect and how it works.

Answer: The McGurk effect is created when a video is manipulated so there is a mismatch between the visual information, which shows a person uttering one sound, and the auditory information, which involves a different sound being played simultaneously. This mismatch distorts the auditory perception of a phoneme. For example, if the listener hears ba as they see a speaker form the syllable ga with their lips, the final experience reported by the speaker is hearing the syllable da, because the visual information interferes with the auditory input and a hybrid of the two streams is perceived.

Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 6. Under what conditions does the Ganong effect disappear? What does this tell us about the effects of context on word perception?

Answer: When the auditory signal is not ambiguous, the listener reports hearing the non-word clearly, and thus the context effect is eliminated. This supports the idea that although context plays an important role in helping us make sense of ambiguous auditory stimuli and leads us to interpret ambiguity in a useful and meaningful way, a lack of ambiguity and the bottom-up properties of the signal result in one sound being more activated than others. Context is not strong enough to override this difference in activation and make us hear one sound as if it were another.

Textbook Reference: 7.2 Integrating Multiple Cues Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 7. You move to New York City and have trouble understanding a salesclerk in a local store who has a thick foreign accent. Several months later, your trouble has mostly vanished. Explain what this reveals about peoples’ sensitivity to acoustic details in speech.

Answer: With exposure, people are generally sensitive enough to adjust to most of the shifts of phonemic boundaries between talkers. This improves their understanding without awareness or knowledge of how the improvement occurs.

Textbook Reference: 7.3 Adapting to a Variety of Talkers Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 8. Refer to the figure.

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Figure. Average looking time was measured while broadcast phonemes either alternated (between Hindi /d_/ and /dj/) or stayed the same (repeating /d_/, or repeating /dj/). Observations were taken when infants sucked on either a U-shaped teether that allowed free tongue movement (left bar) or a flat teether that immobilized subjects’ tongues (right bar). Scores greater than zero indicate a preference for the alternating phonemes. Error bars denote Standard Error of the Mean. The asterisk marks a significant difference from zero.

Infants spend more time looking at a loudspeaker, on average, if they detect an acoustic change within a stream of repeating sounds that it broadcasts. Based on the figure from Bruderer et al.’s 2015 study of speech perception by 6-month-old English-speaking infants (above), does the articulatory system of infants influence whether the babies hear phoneme distinctions between non-English consonants? Explain briefly.

Answer: Yes, when their tongue is held firmly down by the flat teether (right bar), the infants fail to look longer in response to hearing the contrasting sounds than hearing the consistently similar sounds. Thus, in the case when they can move their tongues, their preference for the contrasting sounds seems to be due to them planning imitating movements with their own tongues that aid in their perception of the distinctions in the speech sounds.

Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 9. How does a ventriloquist exploit features of speech perception to create the illusion that the dummy is the source of the speech the audience hears? Be specific in referring to several of both the perceptual phenomena involved, and the on-stage strategies at play.

Answer: Visual cues about the localization of a sound source carry more weight than auditory cues, especially when visual attention is directed by a catchy bright, humorously distorted dummy. Ventriloquists practice making a variety of speech sounds with their lips stationary, slightly apart. When faced with the need to make a sound that would require moving the lips,

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successful ventriloquists learn to substitute a close sound, and they rely on the Ganong effect or phoneme restoration effect for the listener’s expectations to make ambiguous sounds seem to be those appropriate to a target word (ideally a long word, with few close competitors).

Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 10. There is evidence that developmental dyslexia is related to deficits in speech perception.

Name specific examples of these deficits that could lead to dyslexia.

Answer: First, if phonemic awareness is poor, children will have a hard time matching individual speech sounds with their corresponding written representations. Second, categorical perception of consonants may be so poor in dyslexic individuals that they have been unable to group together the sounds that should all match up, as a category, with the same written symbol. Third, dyslexic individuals may have trouble with talker adaptation, meaning that for similar reasons they cannot focus on just the relevant acoustic cues that identify categories of phonemes. Fourth, inabilities to detect speech within noise may be a related auditory deficit. It might also be possible to argue that literacy itself (i.e., reading experience) trains us to listen for constituent phonemes rather than whole syllables.

Textbook Reference: 7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 8: Word Recognition Multiple Choice 1. If participants were asked to complete a lexical decision task, which priming word would result in the fastest recognition of bread as a real word? a. Baker, because of the semantic link between bread and a bakery b. Child, because children often enjoy baked goods that come from bakers c. Mailbox, because of the similar shape between a mailbox and a loaf of bread d. White, because this is the typical color of bread Answer: a Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 2. Which scenario provides evidence of inhibition? a. When participants are shown a display containing pictures of a boat, a seed, a goat, and a light bulb, and are asked to click on the boat, the movement of their eyes to the target is slower than when the goat is replaced by a present. b. When participants are shown a display containing pictures of a boat, a seed, an anchor, and a light bulb, and are asked to click on the boat, the movement of their eyes to the target is faster than when the anchor is replaced by a present. c. During a lexical decision task, participants more quickly identify still as a word if they were previously primed by the word stiff than if primed by door. d. When asked to click on the hammer, participants ignore the picture of a box of tissues because it is not related to a hammer.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 3. Competition tends to a. facilitate word recognition. b. inhibit word recognition. c. lead to steady improvement in word recognition over time. d. enhance semantic priming.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 4. Which of the following words has the highest phonetic neighborhood density? a. Bee

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

b. Orange c. Swing d. Harp Answer: a Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 5. is the phenomenon in which it takes longer to recognize a word that shares sounds with many other words than it does to recognize a word that is very phonetically distinct from other words. a. Semantic priming b. Facilitation c. Neighborhood density effect d. Mediated semantic priming Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 6. Which word activation sequence best represents what you would expect to occur during mediated semantic priming? a. hemlock → key → door → window b. spit → spin → spot → spout c. bike → pedal → foot → sock d. stem → flower → petal → rose Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 7. Here is a lexical decision task in which a prime is presented very briefly, covered by a “mask,” and then followed by a target word. What is the rationale for using this masked priming methodology?

Related Prime Prime: NURSE (50 ms) Mask: ##### (500 ms) Target: DOCTOR Unrelated Prime Prime: WRENCH (50 ms) Mask: ###### (500 ms) Target: DOCTOR a. It reduces the likelihood that participants will use a task-specific strategy of trying to think of words related to NURSE or WRENCH. b. It increases the likelihood that participants will respond faster to DOCTOR when it is preceded by a related word, such as NURSE, than an unrelated word, like WRENCH.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

c. It decreases the likelihood that participants will respond faster to DOCTOR when it is preceded by a related word, such as NURSE, than an unrelated word, like WRENCH. d. It allows researchers to present the target stimulus at just the right time when a priming effect is most likely to occur.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 8. Which of the following is not a factor affecting word recognition time? a. Frequency b. Age when the word is first acquired c. Transitional probability between phonemes d. Length Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 9. If you were designing a study, which of the following two words would not be fair to include in the same condition due to differences in how they are accessed? a. Battle and paddle because they rhyme and are a minimal pair b. Doctor and ornithologist because they differ in frequency, length and age of acquisition c. Teacher and teaches because they are two different parts of speech d. Love and peace because they are too conceptually similar and conceptually abstract Answer: b Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 10. If participants were asked to respond by pulling a lever toward or away from them, which of the following results might happen? a. Pulling faster toward themselves for the target sentence She opened the drawer than for She closed the drawer b. Pushing faster away from themselves for the target sentence She opened the drawer than for She closed the drawer c. Pushing faster away from themselves for the target sentence She grabbed a cold soda from the fridge than for She put the soda in the fridge d. Pulling faster toward themselves for the target sentence She pushed her friend toward the door than for She pulled her friend away from the door Answer: a Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 11. Identify the pair of homophones. a. listen, hear b. breed, bred c. sew, sewn d. peer, pier

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 8.2 Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 12. Which scenario describes a crossmodal task? a. Participants primed with an image of a horse must decide if the letter sequence they see next is a word or a non-word. b. Participants hear the sentence John jumped in the water, and must decide if the letter sequence they see next is a word or a non-word. c. After hearing the word anger, participants are asked to say as many semantically related words as possible in 30 seconds. d. After seeing a series of various dog faces, participants are asked to categorize visually presented words as animal or object.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 8.2 Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 13. In Swinney’s 1979 crossmodal priming study, which condition led to decreased activation of the test word’s meaning that was not primed? a. Decreasing the ISI between the test word and the prime b. Presenting the study passage at a louder volume c. Increasing the ISI between the test word and the prime d. Presenting the study passage text on the screen along with the auditory presentation of the study passage Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.2 Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 14. You are running a study similar to Duffy et al.’s 1988 experiment. You will present participants with the following sentence: The advisory met once per week. The blank will be filled with either cabinet or group. Which word will take participants longer to read, and why? a. Group, because it is a more commonly used word than cabinet in the English language b. Cabinet, because it is the more often used and dominant term for a collection of people c. Group, because it is an unambiguous word for a collection of people d. Cabinet, because it is the less frequently used and subordinate term for a collection of people Answer: d Textbook Reference: 8.2 Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 15. Which scenario illustrates implicit priming of behavior? a. Observing the rate of yawning in participants when presented with words related to sleep (including dream and bed) versus words not related to sleep b. Observing whether participants choose an item of clothing based on its accessibility/position in their closet c. Comparing food sales at 9:00 am with those at to 5:00 pm at a fast food restaurant

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

d. Measuring participants’ positive/negative ratings of the phrase energy exploration compared with drilling for oil Answer: a Textbook Reference: 8.2 Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 16. You hear the sentence “Liam was out in the yard digging in the garden,” and subsequently you recognize the word mole faster as the animal and not in the sense of being a spy. Which is not a realistic explanation for this effect? a. Pre-activation of semantic features based on context b. Bottom-up recognition of multiple meanings c. Inhibitory links between multiple meanings of polysemous words d. Masked priming Answer: d Textbook Reference: 8.2 Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 17. As you begin to hear the word storm, other phonetically similar words such as store and stomp may also be activated during the first few hundred milliseconds of storm. Which model or effect best accounts for this type of spoken word activation? a. Neighborhood density effect b. Marslen-Wilson’s cohort model c. McGurk effect d. Implicit semantic priming Answer: b Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 18. The uniqueness point for the word rotund is a. ro. b. rot. c. rotu. d. rotun.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 19. Which word pair represents the closest cohort competitors of the word sandwich? a. sandy, sandal b. sumo, sushi c. satiate, satire d. song, seal Answer: a Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

20. Which example supports the idea that semantic information about cohort competitors may be activated during incremental language processing? a. Presentation of batter speeds up lexical decision responses to battle and bat. b. Presentation of batter increases eye fixation times for an image of a soldier compared with a librarian. c. Presentation of batter increases eye fixation times for an image of a bat compared with a phone. d. Presentation of batter speeds up lexical decision responses to cake.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 21. Imagine that your child is learning a popular holiday song, and instead of singing “All of the other reindeer,” she has learned the words as “Olive, the other reindeer.” This is an example of a. the rhyme effect. b. a homograph. c. a mondegreen. d. the Ganong effect.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 22. Refer to the figure.

You are carrying out an eye-tracking experiment using this display, similar to one used in Allopenna et al. (1998). The longer eye fixation on the parrot compared to the nickel at the prompt Pick up the carrot is best explained by the a. cohort model.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

b. McGurk effect. c. Ganong effect. d. TRACE model.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 23. In Spivey and Marian’s 1999 study, bilingual English–Russian speakers heard instructions such as Can you hand me the marker? At the same time, the subjects were shown a set of objects that included a stamp, which is pronounced /marka/ in Russian, and a marker. The results of the study support the conclusion that a. lexical items belonging to different languages can compete with one another. b. the neighborhood density effect applies to each language separately. c. the McGurk effect is found only in a person’s dominant language. d. phoneme restoration applies to both languages, but not to the same degree.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 24. Imagine you are learning an obscure language spoken by only a few dozen people in the Sahara Desert. They tell you the translation for “apple” in their language is pronounced “kal-koMAR-ko.” They write this word like so: ₺ ҉ ổ ҉ What type of writing system do these Saharans use? a. Logographic b. Syllabic c. Morphemic d. Alphabetic Answer: b Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 25. The equation 4 + 3 = 7 conveys meaning using a seven conveys meaning using a writing system. a. syllabic; logographic b. alphabetic; syllabic c. logographic; alphabetic d. logographic; syllabic Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

writing system, whereas the word

26. is required to identify the distinct phonemes contained in the word trilobite, a difficult task for young children and illiterate adults. a. Masked priming b. Incremental language processing c. Perceptual invariance

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

d. Phonemic awareness Answer: d Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 27. Considering models of reading, the word is more likely to be activated via the direct route, whereas would be activated by the assembled phonology route. a. mint; fit b. colonel, mint c. mint; enough d. enough; colonel Answer: b Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 28. At the county fair, you hear your sister yell, “Look at the be_ le.” You are surrounded by barking dogs and thus interpret be_ le as beagle, not beetle. Proponents of would argue that your awareness of the context affected your interpretation of the ambiguous word. a. a modular mind design b. an integrative mind design c. the cohort model d. the dual route model Answer: b Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 29. Which of the following is not a reason the English language’s system of spelling is very loosely connected to pronunciation? a. Language pronunciation has been changing while spelling has stayed the same. b. Scribes spelled words with an influence of French and Latin. c. A centralized group of scribes decided spelling early on and did not update the rules. d. Anglo-Saxons adopted an alphabet that did not perfectly correspond to individual phonemes of the English language.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 30. If you are shopping at a market in a country where you do not speak or read the language, you are most likely to understand how much to pay for goods if their prices are presented in a. morphemes. b. syllabic characters. c. logographs. d. alphabetic characters.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Short Answer 1. Yee and Sedivy’s 2006 study used the eye-tracking technique to investigate auditory semantic priming. Provide an example of the kind of visual display that was used, describe their findings, and briefly relate these findings to investigations of the same phenomenon using a lexical decision task.

Answer: Participants were shown a visual display and asked to click on a target picture (such as a hammer) among other items (such as a nail, a box of tissues, and a cricket). Participants accurately identified the object, the hammer. But the eye-tracking data revealed that upon hearing the word hammer, participants tended to look at a semantically related object (e.g., the nail) more often than at unrelated items. The study corroborated the results of lexical decision experiments, which showed that if a word like nail was preceded by a related word like hammer, it was recognized more quickly than if it was preceded by an unrelated word like cricket. The Yee and Sedivy study showed that semantic priming can be observed with spoken language as well as written language, and it provided more detailed information about the time course of activating semantically related words.

Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. Using the lexical decision task, design an experiment to compare the effects of form versus semantic priming on word activation. Include the expected results in your answer.

Answer: Participants would be primed with phonetic neighbors, semantically related words, or control primes. Primes would be presented just before the target word. The researcher would measure how long it takes to identify a target as a word or a non-word. For example, one set of test items could include the test word spin preceded by a semantically related word (such as whirl or turn), a phonetic neighbor (such as span or spit), or a control word (such as boat or tree). Researchers would present participants with whirl, span, or boat during the priming phase, and then measure how long it takes the participants to identify spin as a word. The difference in the time taken to identify spin across the three conditions would provide insight regarding which type of priming affects word activation. Based on other studies, we would expect response times to be faster when primed by semantically related words than when primed by control words, and slower when primed by phonetic neighbors than control words.

Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 3. How does mediated semantic priming provide support for a spreading activation model of word activation?

Answer: In a spreading activation model, words are connected to other words in the lexicon by the strength of their semantic associations based on meaning and usage. Mediated semantic priming occurs when a word’s activation is facilitated by an indirect relation to another word, such as when the word news primes paper, which then primes towel. The more distant the semantic or phonetic association, the less effective the priming. So in a lexical decision task, we would expect faster response times to paper than towel if both are primed by the word news.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 4. Describe how both excitatory and inhibitory connections can contribute to the process of recognizing the word stove.

Answer: When the word stove is presented, individual phoneme units within the word, such as “s”, “t” and “v,” become activated, and this activation flows along excitatory connections to words that contain these sounds, such as stove but also phonetically similar words such as stave and starve. This means that those other, phonetically similar words compete with the word stove.

However, there are also inhibitory connections between these competing words, so that as a word unit becomes activated, it suppresses the activation of competing words. Because stove is the best phonetic match for the sounds that are being heard, it is the most heavily activated among the competing words, and will exert the strongest inhibitory pressure, resulting in activation that is much higher than its competitors.

Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 5. Are words in memory isolated abstract representations of meaning, or are they linked to perceptual memories of our experiences of the meanings of words? Support your answer with evidence from the text.

Answer: (Answers may vary. A complete answer need refer to only one of the several studies in the text that apply to this question.) Evidence suggests that our current physical state affects access to words related to that physical state. Boulenger and colleagues (2008) reported differences in participants’ speed of activation of action words depending on their ability to control their own movements. The study was run with a group of individuals suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Participants who were given a medication that gave them more control over their movement retrieved action words more quickly than the participants who did not receive the medication. Other studies have led to similar conclusions. For instance, Warrington and Shallice (1984) found that people with damage to the vision-processing regions of their brain had difficulty accessing words that refer to concepts that are experienced visually (like birds).

Likewise, Klatzky et al. (1989) found that participants more quickly accessed nouns such as pen or knife if their body was poised in a position in which they would make use of the object. These studies suggest that the mental representation of a word is not stored in isolation as an arbitrary linguistic unit. Rather, words appear to be intimately connected with the brain regions that are associated with their underlying meanings.

Textbook Reference: 8.1 A Connected Lexicon Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 6. Refer to the figure.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Based on the figure, describe the effects of context on word activation and how the models in A and B differ with regard to how they characterize the influence of context on understanding the ambiguous word bank.

Answer: Figure A is a model that allows only bottom-up processing of incoming stimuli. First, activation from the individual sounds flows up to the word level to activate both meanings of bank. Both meanings are initially equally active, since they receive equal amounts of activation from the sound level. At a later stage, the listener consults the context to decide which meaning is more appropriate for the situation. Figure B, is a model in which context is allowed to have a direct, top-down effect on the activation of the words. Here, both meanings of bank receive the same amount of bottom-up activation from the sound level, but activation can simultaneously flow downward from the context to the word level; given that one meaning is a better fit with the context than the other, that meaning will receive a greater amount activation from the context.

Textbook Reference: 8.2 Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 7. Consider the Berger and Fitzsimons (2008) study in which photographs of dogs were presented to people, after which they felt more positively about products with the Puma brand name. This is presumably because the semantic relationship between dogs and pumas made the brand name feel more familiar, a factor that is known to promote positive attitudes. Design an experiment involving brand names to further explore the link between familiarity and attitudes, but focus on familiarity related to the sounds of brand names rather than their meanings. Be sure to include examples of key stimuli and appropriate controls, and to specify which conditions you are comparing and the results you expect.

Answer: (Answers may vary, but should include a means of inducing a sense of phonetic familiarity. Below are two examples based on concepts in the text.) a) The experiment would have a priming phase activating unrelated or related sounds, followed by a test phase in which brand preference is determined. In the priming phase, participants would make lexical decisions to a list of words. Half of the participants would be primed with words that are phonetically similar to the target brand but unrelated to the other brand. The other half of the participants would be primed with words that have no sound overlap at all with the target

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

brand. In the test phase, participants would be shown several images, some with the target brand packaging and some with other brand’s containers, and asked to rate how much they would like to buy each product. I predict that the group primed with words phonetically related to the target brand will have higher ratings for the target brand than the group primed with unrelated words. b) This experiment would examine the effects of neighborhood density on preferences for novel brand name preferences. All else being equal, new brand names that have many phonetically similar neighbors should feel more familiar than brand names that have very few phonetic neighbors because they will activate many other words in the lexicon. For this study, a pair of familiar and unfamiliar stimuli would be created and paired with certain products, thus becoming novel brand names. One brand name will have many phonetically similar neighbors (e.g., lin) whereas the other will have very few neighbors (e.g., zav). Participants will see photos of the products with the brand name appearing below the photo, and they will rate how much they would like to buy each product. The stimuli will be counterbalanced so that half of the participants will see Beverage A with the brand name Lin and Beverage B with the brand name Zav, and the other half will see Beverage A with the brand name Zav and Beverage B with the brand name Lin. This is done to control for any inherent preferences for either of the products in the photos. Ratings for brand names from dense lexical neighborhoods (lin) are expected to be higher than ratings for brand names from sparse lexical neighborhoods.

Textbook Reference: 8.2 Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 8. Refer to the figure.

Based on Allopenna et al.’s 1998 study, describe the time course of spoken word activation and what would happen as subjects hear the word beaker while viewing this figure.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Answer: As we hear the first phonemes of a spoken word, we begin to activate possible phonetic candidates. As the word’s other phonetic components are also recognized, phonetic neighbors that do not contain those components are suppressed, and we are left with fewer and fewer candidate words, until the target word is activated. Phonetic neighbors that do not match the target become less active as they diverge from the signal of the target word. For example, subjects who hear the word beaker would show near equal activation rates, based on how long they gaze at either an image of a beaker or a beetle until they heard the phonemes /k/, at which time, they would focus more on the image of the target word, indicating that beetle was a less viable candidate for activation. Words that rhyme with the target (speaker) are also activated, even though they are not cohort candidates; however, they become activated slightly later than cohorts like beetle, and their activation level is never as high as the cohort.

Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 9. What prediction would the cohort model make about the activation of the word weaver when subjects hear the word cleaver? What prediction would the TRACE model make in the same scenario? Explain the mechanisms behind each model’s predictions.

Answer: The cohort model predicts that weaver will be no more activated than an unrelated word that has no sound overlap at all with cleaver, such as tablet. This is because the cohort model states that activation is limited to words that have the same onset as the word being spoken. For example, upon hearing the first phoneme in cleaver, only words beginning with that phoneme (e.g., car, kiss, clover, cleats, etc.) will become activated; upon hearing the second phoneme, only words beginning with the same two phonemes will be activated (e.g., clover, cleats, etc.) and so on. In contrast, the TRACE model predicts that weaver will be activated to a greater degree than tablet upon hearing the word cleaver. This is because the TRACE model predicts activation to increase for any word that overlaps substantially with the word being spoken, regardless of whether this overlap occurs at the beginning, middle, or end of the word.

Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 10. You want to observe and measure lexical activation and describe the incremental dynamics of some process. What measurement tools might you use and why?

Answer: Eye-tracking, EEG, fMRI, NIRS, etc. Each of the measurements will include some description emphasizing that there is better temporal resolution than other behavioral methods.

Textbook Reference: 8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 11. Consider Perfetti et al.’s 2010 analysis of which brain areas are activated during reading of Chinese and English characters and what you know about the differences between the alphabetic and logographic writing systems. What advice would you give an English speaker learning to read Chinese?

Answer: Perfetti et al. found that reading Chinese, which uses a logographic writing system, tends to produce more bilateral activity in the visual areas, whereas increased brain activity tends to be more localized in the left hemisphere when reading English. This suggests that an English speaker may need to be especially patient as her brain learns to recruit new networks that have not previously been used for reading. In an alphabetic writing system, each character or phoneme

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

carries no intrinsic meaning. In a logographic writing system, each character already contains a great deal of meaning. When learning Chinese, English speakers should focus on memorizing the specific meaning of the characters and the sounds that relate to those meanings because there is no way to sound out words in Chinese.

Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 12. Use the connectionist model of reading to explain how we learn to read both irregularly spelled words (such as knock and enough) and phonetically regular ones (e.g., mint and stab).

Answer: The connectionist model accounts for our ability to make sense of both irregular and regular spellings by strengthened connections between sequences of letters and the phonetic and semantic aspects of word representations based on their usage and likelihood of occurrence.

Constant feedback between the phonetic, orthographic, and semantic characteristics of words results in a web or connection between these aspects of written language. Irregularly spelled words are understood because they, too, have their own set of connections between these three aspects of written language; however, because these orthographic patterns occur less often than regular spelling patterns, these connections may be weaker than for regularly spelled words.

Therefore, in this model, there are no “rules” for spelling; we merely get the impression that there are rules because some patterns that are used to spell words are much more common than others.

Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 13. If you were to redesign the orthography of the English language to better correspond to pronunciation, what aspects would you change, and what challenges to a uniform pronunciation would you encounter?

Answer: Each phoneme would need a corresponding symbol, requiring new symbols for sounds such as /sh/ which are one sound but two letters. All words would need to be respelled according to this new system. Challenges include word spellings that would be resistant to change such as people’s names, having a centralized system that would regulate spelling over time, and differences in accent where pronunciations differ between regions.

Textbook Reference: 8.4 Reading Written Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Test Bank to accompany

Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 9: Understanding Sentence Structure and Meaning Multiple Choice 1. Which outcome suggests that participants process meaning during the shadowing task? a. Participants’ shadowing slows down when the sentence they are repeating combines meaningful words in nonsensical ways. b. Participants say that they are processing the meaning as they shadow what they hear. c. Researchers ask the participants to report the gist of each sentence. d. Shadowing is the process of understanding.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. Which sentence is a garden path sentence? a. The lawyer with a wart was hit by the gang leader. b. The gang leader hit the lawyer with a wart. c. The cruel man beat his puppy using a thick stick. d. The puppy was beaten with a thick stick by the cruel man.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 3. In the sentence The stew simmered on the stove turned out to be delicious, the phrase simmered on the stove is ambiguous because it is missing certain function words. This grammatical structure is known as a a. conjoined clause. b. reduced relative clause. c. sentence complement. d. main clause.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 4. In the sentence The cruel man beat his puppy with a thick stick, a. the cruel man b. beat his puppy c. puppy d. a thick stick Answer: d © 2019 Oxford University Press

is the indirect object.

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 5. In the sentence The cruel man beat his puppy with a thick stick, is the subject. a. the cruel man b. beat c. his puppy d. a thick stick Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 6. Grammatically, exemplifies a sentence in passive voice; whereas uses an active voice. a. The man jumped on the trampoline; The man is jumping on the trampoline b. The plumber was sued by the baker; The baker sued the plumber c. The horse is racing past the fence; The horse who was raced past the fence tripped d. The thief is taking the jewels; The jewels were taken by the thief Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 7. Imagine that you are designing a study to evaluate whether certain types of sentences are ambiguous and lead to misunderstanding. Which technique would permit the most natural environment for your study? a. Self-paced reading task b. Shadowing task c. Moving window paradigm d. Eye-tracking reading task Answer: d Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 8. Refer to the example, in which participants read through sentences a phrase at a time, pressing a button to advance from step 1 through 3.

1. The British .

2. left waffles .

3 ------------------------- on Falkland Islands.

The above stimulus is an example of which research method? a. Lexical decision task b. Shadowing task c. Eye-tracking method d. Moving window paradigm Answer: d

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 9. Consider the sentence Let’s eat grandma. Which vocal cue would help disambiguate the sentence? a. A pause between the word eat and the word grandma b. A rising intonation at the end of the sentence c. Articulating grandma clearly d. Speaking the sentence at an even speed Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 10. The garden path theory stipulates that parsers rely on about the meaning of an ambiguous sentence. a. strict rules b. heuristics c. interactive model processes d. phonetic cues Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.2 Models of Ambiguity Resolution Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 11. The garden path theory places emphasis on the during the initial parsing phase. a. phonetics; syntax b. speed; accuracy c. semantics; syntax d. rules; short cuts Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.2 Models of Ambiguity Resolution Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

to make initial predictions

rather than

of processing

12. suggested that people often use heuristics to solve problems, and sometimes these shortcuts in thought lead us to make errors in judgments. a. Maryellen McDonald b. John McIntyre c. Daniel Kahneman d. Tom Bever Answer: c Textbook Reference: 9.2 Models of Ambiguity Resolution Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 13. Understanding thematic relations of a verb a. always results in the disambiguation of a garden path sentence. b. does not help to disambiguate a garden path sentence.

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c. allows a listener to make inferences about the event and participant relationships being described in a sentence. d. is helpful for resolving ambiguities involving reduced relative clauses, but not other ambiguities.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 14. Which sentence contains an intransitive verb? a. The long letter arrived. b. Tim wrote a note to Arianna. c. The portrait artist drew a face. d. The dog ate my homework.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 15. Which sentence contains a sentential complement verb? a. The yellow bird sings sweetly. b. The weary traveler slept. c. The police office recommended that she not drive at night. d. Please hand me the largest wrench.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 16. In their 1998 study, John Trueswell and Al Kim (1998) found that they could steer readers toward one or another interpretation of a garden path sentence by subliminally presenting an unrelated verb that was biased toward either a direct object or a sentential complement frame.

This shows a. that inhibiting the activation of phonetic neighbors helps disambiguate a garden path sentence. b. that readers must consciously select the right verb frame in disambiguating garden path sentences. c. the importance of discourse context in disambiguating garden path sentences. d. that it is possible to use a word to prime similar verb frames as well as similar meanings.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 17. Refer to the figure.

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Based on the results of the experiment illustrated, how does context affect a subject’s ability to make sense of the ambiguous component in the sentence Put the apple on the towel in the box? a. The pencil does not aid the listener in A, but the apple in B provides context, helping the subject avoid confusion. b. The listener is confused in both A and B. Since they do not know to look only at the apple on the towel, they look at the single apple first. c. The time spent looking at the towel in A demonstrates a clear understanding of the sentence. d. The two sets of timelines of eye-gaze duration in A and B show that context does not affect the listener’s ability to disambiguate sentence.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 18. Refer to the figure.

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Based on eye movements, which statement about subjects’ perceptions of the two sentences is true? a. Both sentences reveal some initial misinterpretation by listeners. b. The first sentence reveals some initial misinterpretation, whereas the second sentence is smoothly and correctly parsed. c. The second sentence reveals some initial misinterpretation, whereas the first sentence is smoothly and correctly parsed. d. Listeners are able to use context to avoid misinterpretation in both sentences.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 19. Chambers et al. (2004) used an eye movement study to compare where people would look when given instructions about eggs that were either in their shell or cracked in a container. This study suggested that plays an important role in disambiguating spoken language, supporting the . a. frequency-based information; garden path theory b. frequency-based information; constraint-based approach c. context; garden path theory d. context; constraint-based approach Answer: d Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

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20. In which situation would speakers be most likely to use prosodic cues that are helpful for disambiguating spoken language? a. Working together with a friend to build a birdhouse b. Giving instructions for building a birdhouse over the phone to a friend c. Reading instructions for building a birdhouse aloud to a friend c. Recording instructions for building a birdhouse to be heard by a friend at a later time Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 21. Refer to the figure.

According to Kamide et al.’s 2003 study, where would subjects look as they heard The beer was drunk by…? a. Participants’ eyes would jump around the scene, scanning all the objects until the sentence was completed. b. Participants would look toward the girl before the sentence was even completed. c. Participants would look toward the person wearing a helmet before the sentence was even completed. d. Participants would focus on the beer until the sentence was completed.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 9.4 Making Predictions Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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22. Kamide and colleagues (2003) investigated predictive language processes and found that after hearing only the first few words, Japanese speakers a. wrongly interpreted grammatical cues to draw incorrect predictions about how a sentence might end. b. used specific grammatical cues to predict how a sentence might end. c. fixed their eyes on a picture of the subject of the sentence. d. avoided making the kinds of predictions about the end of a sentence that English speakers often make in similar studies.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.4 Making Predictions Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 23. Based on ERP studies of language predictability, which sentence would likely generate the largest N400 effect in response to the underlined word? a. The teacher spilled his tea. b. He stopped by the store to pick up a loaf of cheese. c. The runner tripped over a root. d. He eats his cereal in a bowls.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.4 Making Predictions Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 24. What seems to be a crucial difference between using ERP analysis and eye tracking to evaluate subjects’ moment-by-moment experiences of spoken language? a. ERPs can capture unconscious processing, whereas eye-tracking studies can only provide information about conscious linguistic processes. b. Eye tracking provides researchers with data about moment-by-moment processing of language, whereas ERP data only allows them to view discrete time points within the process. c. ERP experiments allow researchers to test more abstract or complex language, whereas eyetracking studies are limited to stimuli that can be easily represented in pictures. d. Eye tracking is an older and more established technique among researchers, whereas ERP is still considered to be in its developmental infancy.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 9.4 Making Predictions Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 25. Refer to the figure.

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The figure represents the N400 values for the sentence The day was breezy so the boy went outside to fly… when subjects heard either airplane or kite as the final word. What can be inferred from the graph? a. Subjects who heard kite showed greater N400 negativity, indicating less surprise. b. Subjects who heard kite showed less N400 negativity, indicating more surprise. c. Subjects who heard airplane showed less N400 negativity, indicating less surprise. d. Subjects who heard airplane showed greater N400 negativity, indicating more surprise.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 9.4 Making Predictions Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 26. Isabelle, 4, has the vocabulary of a 5-year-old. Sam, 5, has an average vocabulary for his age.

In a study of language processing based on predictive eye movement, a. Isabelle’s eye movements toward relevant visual cues would be faster than Sam’s. b. Sam’s eye movements toward relevant visual cues would be faster than Isabelle’s. c. the children would orient to relevant visual cues at similar speeds. d. we would learn about orientation to relevant visual cues in young children because this age group has not yet been studied.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 9.4 Making Predictions Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 27. Consider these two sentences: 1. The lawyer who the judge addressed stood.

2. The lawyer who addressed the judge stood.

Based on the work of Ted Gibson (1998), which of these sentences will be more difficult to read, and why? a. Sentence 1, because it contains an object relative clause b. Sentence 1, because it contains two semantically similar nouns c. Sentence 2, because it is more complex structurally d. Sentence 2, because it contains a subject relative clause © 2019 Oxford University Press

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Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.5 When Memory Fails Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 28. Consider these two sentences: 1. The lawyer who the judge addressed stood.

2. The lawyer who addressed the judge stood.

Some researchers believe sentence 2 will be easier to read than sentence 1 because readers more frequently encounter the type of structure found in sentence 2. This expectation stresses the role of in comprehension. a. memory b. morphology c. semantic similarity d. structural complexity Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.5 When Memory Fails Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 29. According to Just and Carpenter (1992), subjects who score poorly on the reading span test should a. have considerably more difficulty interpreting object relative clauses than subject relative clauses. b. avoid committing to a single interpretation of a garden path sentence. c. show weak long-term retention of sentences that are syntactically ambiguous. d. show an especially large P600 effect for ungrammatical sentences.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 30. The is an experimental method, developed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980), in which a subject’s verbal working memory is measured. a. shadowing task b. Stroop test c. reading span test d. window moving paradigm Answer: c Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 31. During the Stroop test, subjects a. experience interference from the physical characteristics of a word, such as the color in which it is written, as they attempt to read the word out loud. b. are asked to identify a visually presented word while another word is simultaneously presented auditorily. c. are asked to repeat out loud what they hear through head phones as soon as they hear it.

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d. experience interference from the semantic characteristics of words as they attempt to identify their physical characteristics, such as color.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 32. Considering the “kindergarten-path effect,” if your 4.5-year-old sister was asked to Put the bunny on the blanket on the shelf, what would she do? a. She would have no trouble following the directions, since cognitive control in children is quite developed from a very early age. b. There is less than a 50 percent chance that she would follow the directions as they are given, as children her age seem to have a tough time understanding ambiguous sentences. c. She would not be able to follow the directions, as cognitive control does not begin to mature until adolescence. d. She would put both the bunny and the blanket on the shelf, as children interpret such sentences as indicating that all objects listed are subject to the action.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 33. Which pair offers the best example of competence and performance, respectively? a. Distinguishing grammatical sentences from ungrammatical ones; being able to speak grammatically b. Being able to write grammatical sentences; explaining the rules of grammar to your friend c. Speaking a foreign language; reading a foreign language d. Speaking a foreign language; understanding what is said in a foreign language Answer: a Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 34. Which of the following is a confound, preventing researchers from concluding that bilinguals have an advantage in cognitive control? a. Bilinguals are known to be smarter on average, making them better at language learning. b. Bilinguals have a wide variety of different language experiences and different amounts of exposure to their two languages. c. Cultural effects from bilinguals’ native countries interfere with their ability to complete certain kinds of tasks similarly enough to monolinguals. d. Interference from bilinguals’ native languages interferes with their second language, preventing them from completing assessments in the same way as monolinguals.

Answer: b.

Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

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Short Answer 1. What are garden path sentences? Provide an example of a garden path sentence as well as a possible way to remedy it.

Answer: Garden path sentences are sentences that are grammatically correct, but are difficult to interpret. They are difficult to understand because they include an ambiguous phrase (for example, a reduced relative clause) that leads the reader or listener to an incorrect interpretation, which must then be revised once it becomes clear that the initial interpretation cannot be correct.

For example, The wrestler taught new skills easily won the match. A more understandable version might be: The wrestler who was taught new skills easily won the match.

Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. The mouse the cat chased keeled over. For the sentence, identify the main and subordinate clauses and the reasons for this classification.

Answer: The main clause is The mouse keeled over. The subordinate clause is the cat chased.

The main clause is generally the main idea or what a sentence is about, which is, in this case, the mouse keeling over. The subordinate clause, the cat chased, supports the description of the mouse, the subject of the sentence.

Textbook Reference: 9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 3. How does the garden path theory explain our ability to parse and interpret sentences that contain ambiguities, such as The patient accepted the prognosis was dire?

Answer: The garden path theory holds that the reader would make an initial interpretation of the ambiguous phrase The patient accepted the prognosis using the simplest and most easily constructed syntactic option: that is, the prognosis is a direct object of the verb accepted. This initial interpretation would be constructed without considering any alternative readings or evaluating any of the possible interpretations in terms of their general plausibility or how they fit into the larger discourse context. Then, due to the additional, unexpected information in the last portion of the sentence, the reader would go back and adjust the final interpretation of the sentence to reflect the fact that the prognosis is actually the subject of a subordinate clause.

Textbook Reference: 9.2 Models of Ambiguity Resolution Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 4. Consider the sentences.

The man led to the bench had a walking stick.

The man sat on the bench had a walking stick.

How does the constraint-based approach account for the parsing of these garden path sentences?

Based on this approach, how would it affect your reading of the sentences to know that the man had dementia?

Answer: The constraint-based theory proposes that not all potentially ambiguous sentences cause confusion for readers to the same degree. Whether readers initially pursue the wrong interpretation (in this case, a simple main clause rather than a reduced relative clause) depends on a variety of cues that are considered together. In the first sentence, the reader is less likely to experience a garden path effect because the verb led usually appears with a direct object—the

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absence of a direct object immediately after this verb serves as a cue to the reader that a reduced relative clause may be involved. In contrast, the verb sat in the second sentence does not usually appear with a direct object, hence the absence of one after the verb is consistent with the initial incorrect main clause reading. The constraint-based approach also predicts that top-down processing, including the use of semantic and contextual information, contributes to how we initially interpret each sentence. For instance, without contextual information, readers assume the phrase the man sat is used in the active voice, since the word sat is most often used to describe an action people take, not an action done to someone. Knowing that the man has dementia would make us more open to alternative uses of the verb sat. The concept of someone with dementia being “sat down on a bench” by another individual would be plausible and more readily accessible based on our understanding that such a man may behave less autonomously. Thus, we would struggle less to interpret the sentence, even on the first pass.

Textbook Reference: 9.2 Models of Ambiguity Resolution Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 5. What is one of the major differences between garden path and constraint-based theories of sentence parsing?

Answer: Constraint-based theory emphasizes that an ambiguous sentence is disambiguated with the assistance of semantic and contextual information, whereas the garden path theory does not employ these sources until it reaches a point of confusion related to the initial interpretation.

Textbook Reference: 9.2 Models of Ambiguity Resolution Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 6. Consider the results of Trueswell and Kim’s 1998 study of syntactic framing in which subjects were asked to complete a self-paced reading task on sentences containing ambiguities. Did the researchers demonstrate that it is possible to affect a person’s ability to disambiguate garden path sentences without that person having conscious access to disambiguating information? Explain.

Answer: Yes, in this study, Trueswell and Kim were able to manipulate the length of time it took subjects to read ambiguous sentences by subliminally presenting information that biased readers’ interpretations toward either the correct or incorrect reading, thereby either helping them avoid a garden path effect or creating a stronger garden path effect. Specifically, while participants were in the middle of reading a sentence, researchers flashed verbs so briefly that participants were not aware of them; these verbs created an expectation of either a following noun phrase as a direct object or a sentential complement. The results demonstrated that the brief and unconscious priming with a verb of a particular frame influenced the subject to interpret an ambiguous verb (with multiple possible frames) as having the same frame as the prime.

Textbook Reference: 9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

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7. Refer to the figure.

Based on the results of Kamide et al.’s 2003 study, which images would a participant look at as they hear The beer was drunk by…? How does this outcome help us understand the time course of sentence parsing and how various sources of information are integrated?

Answer: The image that subjects would be most likely to glance toward as they hear the first few words of the sentence is the mug of beer. Upon hearing was drunk by, participants would glance toward the person in the helmet. This outcome contributes to our understanding of the timecourse of sentence parsing by demonstrating that people make predictions about what they are about to hear based on their interpretation of the sentence to that point, together with expectations based on top-down processes, such as knowledge of the world or the statistical likelihood that the sentence will include certain linguistic content.

Textbook Reference: 9.4 Making Predictions Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 8. ERP and eye tracking have both been found to be useful for studying predictive language processing in spoken language, but there may be specific experimental circumstances in which one would be more appropriate than the other. What would you need to consider when deciding whether to use the ERP or the eye-tracking method?

Answer: Both ERP and eye tracking allow researchers to observe some of the moment-bymoment expectations of subjects as they process language. However, eye tracking requires the stimulus sentences to be ones that are easily illustrated with pictures. This is because the method provides information about how subjects are interpreting the sentence based on their eye movements to images that are related in some way to what they are hearing or expecting to hear.

In contrast, ERP measures electrical activity in the brain to determine how surprised subjects are to hear a particular word. This can be achieved even if the words are not easily captured by

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pictures (for example, abstract words like peace, or function words like an). Hence, one important factor would be the nature of the stimuli that are needed to test the specific hypothesis of interest.

Textbook Reference: 9.4 Making Predictions Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 9. How is working memory involved in the process of understanding the structure and meaning of a sentence? Do some sentences place a heavier burden on working memory than others?

Answer: A key component of our sentence processing is the ability to recall all relevant information that is being relayed as a sentence unfolds. Working memory is an integral factor in this process, as it helps us remember how the sentence has thus far unfolded and understand the relationships between critical grammatical constructs such as nouns and verbs, even when a good deal of linguistic material intervenes between related constituents. For example, in the following sentences: The perpetrator who ran from the police tripped and The perpetrator tripped as he ran from the police, the distance between related components is longer in the first sentence than the second sentence. Working memory helps us to keep in mind the relationships between distant components, allowing us to correctly interpret the sentence. But if the sentence involves a very long-distance relationship or multiple long-distance relationships, the sentence may be hard to interpret due to working-memory overload.

Textbook Reference: 9.5 When Memory Fails Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 10. Do individual differences affect people’s language parsing abilities? Provide empirical evidence to support your argument.

Answer: Individual differences do play a role in how we process language. Performance on the reading span task, which is a measure of working memory capacity, is correlated with how difficult it is for us to read through certain complex or ambiguous sentences. Thus, people with poorer memory capacities have poorer parsing abilities for challenging sentences. Also, individuals with specific damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) seem to have more difficulty accessing the subordinate meanings of phrases in ambiguous sentences.

Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 11. Carolina is a 64-year-old woman who grew up in a Spanish-speaking family but has always lived in an English-speaking neighborhood. In her current job, she deals with both English- and Spanish-speaking clients on a daily basis. Frank is a 33-year-old man who spoke only English until college, when he learned Italian. He doesn’t have much opportunity to speak Italian with friends or colleagues, but he enjoys reading challenging books in Italian. Would Carolina or Frank be more likely to show enhanced cognitive control compared to her/his monolingual peers? Base your answer on current explanations for the effect of bilingualism on cognitive control.

Answer: Researchers believe that bilingualism enhances cognitive control because people who know two languages experience competition between them. To resolve this competition, they have to inhibit the activation of linguistic forms in the language other than the one they are speaking at the moment, a process that is thought to strengthen their cognitive control. Such competition is likely to be stronger for people like Carolina, who know both languages equally

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well and switch between languages on a daily basis or use both in the same context. Hence, Carolina is more likely to have developed stronger cognitive control as a result of her bilingualism than Frank, who spends much less time using his second language and does not frequently switch between English and Italian. In addition, the benefits of bilingualism seem to be especially apparent in older adults than in younger adults, so Carolina would likely demonstrate significantly greater cognitive control than her monolingual peers. This may be because cognitive control generally declines with advancing age, and bilingualism helps to prevent or slow down this decline. Thus, since Carolina is older than Frank, the benefits of her bilingualism may be more evident.

Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 12. Describe the task researchers used to measure cognitive control in working memory, and how this relates to the processing of garden path sentences.

Answer: The n-back test was used by Hussey et al. (2017) to measure cognitive control in working memory. Participants had to indicate whether they saw the same letter n letters back while being shown a sequence of letters, one at a time. The further back they have to remember, the more difficult it is to remember correctly. The researchers also included lures, in which the target letter was close but slightly off of the correct number of letters back. So, for example, if it was a 6-back task, the target letter might be presented at the 5th letter, which the participant would have to ignore or suppress. People trained in the more difficult task with lures were able to process garden path sentences that required cognitive control more quickly than participants who were trained in the version without lures. Not all garden path sentences require cognitive control, so some kinds of garden path sentences were processed no differently between the two groups.

Textbook Reference: 9.6 Variable Minds Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 10: Speaking: From Planning to Articulation Multiple Choice 1. Freud erroneously believed that speech errors are a result of a. slips of the tongue due to phonetic activation of nearby similar meaning neighbors. b. repressed subconscious thoughts that we would not be comfortable expressing freely. c. the similarity in form and syntax between the words we would like to say and the ones that actually leave our lips. d. the effects of contextual priming.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. When considering the differences in conversational gaps between English and Italian speakers, on average you would expect to find a. that Italian speakers exhibit significantly shorter gaps between conversational turn taking than English speakers. b. that English speakers exhibit significantly shorter gaps between conversational turn taking than Italian speakers. c. only those Italian speakers who have ulterior motives produce significant lags before responding to questions, but the same is not true of English speakers. d. no significant gap differences between English and Italian speakers.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 3. Based on Stivers and colleagues’ 2009 findings, if you timed the conversational gaps between two people speaking a language other than English you would note that their conversational gaps were, on average, a. very different from the ones that you are used to, regardless of what language they were speaking. b. mostly dependent on the individual speakers’ timing preference. c. not very different from the ones you are used to, although perceptually they may seem so. d. very different depending on whether the language was spoken in a collectivist or individualistic culture.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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4. Suppose you were having a conversation with friends, and one of them said this: “We sat in the living room and heard a rustling sound and realized that the cockroach Rolf had squashed earlier was still running around inside the paper bag.”

This speaker is likely to pause in speech between the words and . a. we; sat b. rustling; sound c. earlier; was d. still; running Answer: c Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 5. Short pauses and disfluency in speech likely indicate that the speaker a. lost her train of thought. b. has a speech disorder. c. did not hear clearly what their conversational partner had said. d. is engaging in some mental activity related to planning speech.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 6. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) investigated sentence planning by measuring how long it took subjects to begin describing a scene they saw on a monitor involving several objects, some of which changed their relative positions. Subjects took longer to begin speaking a sentence when the a. sentence referred to three items than when it referred to two, regardless of how the sentence was structured. b. nouns that occurred in the subject and object of the sentence were very similar to each other than when the nouns were dissimilar. c. sentence contained a direct object than when it did not. d. subject phrase of the sentence contained two nouns than when the object phrase of the sentence contained two nouns.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 7. You are a subject in a study based on Smith and Wheeldon’s 1999 investigation of sentence

planning. You view a series of scenes in which an eagle, a roof, and a balloon appear in different positions relative to each other. With each new scene, you must immediately explain how the relative positions of the eagle, roof, and balloon have changed. Which of the following explanations would require the longer “time before speaking”?

1. The eagle rises over the roof and the balloon.

2. The eagle and the balloon rise over the roof. a. Time before speaking would be shorter for sentence 1.

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b. Time before speaking would be shorter for the sentence 2. c. Time before speaking would be longer for the sentence 2 only if the images were moving across the screen continuously during the experiment. d. There should be no significant difference in time before speaking between the two sentences.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 8. Based on the findings of the study by Smith and Wheeldon (1999), it would take longer to begin to utter a. “The girl fed the little dog with brown spots” than “The little girl with red hair fed the dog.” b. “The little girl with red hair fed the dog” than “The girl fed the little dog with brown spots.” c. “The girl fed the little dog with brown spots” than “The boy and the girl fed the dog.” d. “The girl fed the little dog with brown spots” than “The girl fed the cat and the dog.”

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 9. Spoonerisms, named after the Reverend William A. Spooner, are errors that occur when the speaker a. is distracted by an unrelated visual stimulus. b. mistakenly swaps words with non-words. c. is talking about complex subjects, such as religion. d. mistakenly swaps sounds between words.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 10. Which speech error would be most likely to occur? a. “Verb the most complicated swap.” (Intended: “Swap the most complicated verb.”) b. “Put the sink next to the milk.” (Intended: “Put the milk next to the sink.”) c. “Vake the leers.” (Intended: “Rake the leaves.”) d. “Cake her a nice warm moat.” (Intended: “Make her a nice warm coat.”)

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 11. What important property of speech planning do sound-swapping versus word-swapping errors reveal? a. Semantic word activation precedes phonetic planning in speech planning. b. Phonetic planning processing precedes semantic planning. c. Both phonetic and semantic properties are simultaneously activated during speech planning. d. Speech planning occurs holistically, where an entire sentence is pre-planned before production begins.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production

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Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 12. Refer to the figure.

If speakers were asked to name the picture while ignoring the printed word superimposed on it, you would expect speakers to name the object DOG a. faster when superimposed with BONE than LID. b. slower when superimposed with BONE than DON. c. fastest of the three when superimposed with LID. d. slowest of the three when superimposed with DON. Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 13. Refer to the figure.

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An English-speaking subject in Meyer's 1996 picture-naming study is shown the image above and is asked to identify the pictures from left to right. (The correct respone would be “The church is next to the arrow.”) Just as the image is shown, the subject hears a distractor word. The subject’s delay before speaking would be shortest after hearing as a distractor. a. temple b. bow c. marrow d. churn Answer: d Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 14. Based on the findings of Meyer’s 1996 study, at the point when a person begins to utter the sentence, “The keys are next to the television,” a. the lemmas of both nouns, but only the sounds of the first noun, have been activated. b. both the lemma and sounds of the first noun, but neither the lemma nor the sounds of the second noun, have been activated. c. the lemmas of both nouns have been activated, but not the sounds of either noun. d. neither the lemmas nor the sounds of either noun have been activated.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 15. Arthur is trying to name a key ingredient in his famous fish and chip recipe. He remembers that it is a white powder that helps in the dough rising process, also used in baking. He says, “Then you have to put in two teaspoons of the whatchamacallit.” His inability to retrieve the name of the ingredient while recalling its other characteristics suggests that he a. has activated the lemma associated with that word, but not the word’s sounds. b. has failed to activate the lemma associated with that word. c. should have retrieved the correct word before beginning to speak. d. is about to produce a Freudian slip.

Answer: a

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Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 16. Warriner and Humphreys (2008) found that when subjects were induced to have a tip-of-thetongue (TOT) experience, a. spending longer in a TOT state made it easier for them to remember the word the next time they were asked to recall it. b. spending longer in a TOT state made it more difficult for them to remember the word the next time they were asked to recall it. c. time spent in the TOT state had no effect on their ability to activate the word the next time they were asked to recall it. d. spending longer in a TOT state made it easier for them to remember the word the next time they were asked to recall it, but only if they eventually remembered the word themselves.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 17. In their research, Griffin and Bock (2000) found that participants who are asked to describe a visual scene featuring more than one character or component tend to a. begin speaking about an image the instant it appears. b. analyze all parts of the scene within about a half a second, then begin speaking. c. view the image and analyze the relationships between characters and items for several seconds, then begin speaking. d. view the image, plan the message, formulate sentence structure and access lexical items, then begin speaking.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.3 Formulating Messages Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 18. Imagine this experiment based on Meyer’s 1996 investigation: A square is flashed momentarily on the left side of a computer screen, followed by presentation of the image of a police officer on the left side of the screen chasing a robber on the right side of the screen.

Participants are instructed to describe the scene. Which description reflects the average participant response to this scenario? a. Participants would look at the officer, then the robber, and then begin planning the syntactic structure of their sentence. b. Participants would access the lemmas of both officer and robber, and may use a wide variety of word orders to describe the scenario. c. Participants would access the lemma of robber, retrieve the word robber, and begin speaking before an entire conceptualization or word order has been planned. d. Participants would access the lemma of officer, retrieve the word officer, and begin speaking before an entire conceptualization or word order has been planned.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 10.3 Formulating Messages Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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19. Imagine you witness a car crash in which a blue car crashes into a red car, and that red car crashes into another blue car. When describing the accident to a police officer you say, “The blue car crashed into the red car… um, the Mercedes blue car.” This is known as a. incomplete message planning. b. lexical access failure. c. conversational repair. d. contextual integration.

Answer: c.

Textbook Reference: 10.3 Formulating Messages Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 20. Refer to the figure.

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The figure demonstrates priming, in which reading a sentence with a double object increases the likelihood of producing one with a . a. semantic; double object b. semantic; preposition c. syntactic; double object d. syntactic; preposition Answer: c Textbook Reference: 10.4 Structuring Sentences

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 21. Kay Bock (1986a) showed participants images of various events and asked them to describe what they saw. This study demonstrated that participants’ creation of a spontaneous sentence a. was not influenced by the syntactic structure they produced in the previous sentence. b. occurred faster if participants previously produced a semantically related sentence. c. was slowed if participants previously produced a semantically related sentence. d. resembled the syntactic structure they produced in the previous sentence.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 10.4 Structuring Sentences Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 22. If subjects see the image of a soccer player kicking a ball into a net and are asked to describe the scene, which condition would most likely lead them to use the passive voice to describe what is happening in the image? a. An arrow on the screen points to the player. b. An arrow on the screen points to the net. c. They have just produced a passive sentence. d. They have just produced an active sentence.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 10.4 Structuring Sentences Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 23. In order to ease the memory burden of a long noun phrase, speakers often express it at the end of a sentence. This is referred to as a. lexical bias. b. a spoonerism. c. heavy-NP shift. d. syntactic priming.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 10.4 Structuring Sentences Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 24. Forensic linguist Gerald McMenamin’s work implies that a. writing samples can give us insight into the motives of a killer. b. it is impossible to authenticate the authorship of a document, even with confirmed samples of the person’s previous writing. c. an individual’s linguistic style is unique to them and can help distinguish the authorship of contested documents, such as a will. d. speakers of the same language tend to have the same linguistic styles.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 10.4 Structuring Sentences Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

25. Participants in Ferreira’s 1996 study on sentence construction were asked to create sentences from collections of words that were presented on a screen. Participants tended to make fewer errors and speak faster if a. the number of sentences they were allowed to create from the stimuli was restricted. b. they could create more than one sentence from the stimuli they were given. c. they were syntactically primed by hearing sentences related to the ones they were being asked to create. d. they were timed as they produced novel sentences.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.4 Structuring Sentences Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 26. Participants are asked to quickly read the following list of word pairs silently before reading aloud a pair of target words: fast cone fan coat fad code Which pair of target words would be most likely to result in a sound exchange error? a. cap fort b. fin cane c. cat fold d. cut fake Answer: c Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 27. Which speech error demonstrates the lexical bias effect? Saying . a. rlear coad; clear road b. hags flung; flags hung c. Hoober Heever; Herbert Hoover d. rirt doad; dirt road Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

instead of

28. In order to activate a speaker’s planning phase without involving the mechanical production of words, researchers using the SLIP (spoonerisms in laboratory induced predispositions) technique ask subjects to a. read all word pairs out loud regardless of their function in the experimental design. b. spell the interference words before reading them silently. c. read all non-target words silently to themselves. d. read only the interference words, ignoring all others presented prior.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 29. Motley, Camden, and Baars (1982) found evidence of self-monitoring of speech errors.

When a sound change between target words would result in a spoonerism, subjects took to begin speaking, even if they did not make a speech error. a. taboo; longer b. taboo; shorter c. non-word; longer d. non-word; shorter Answer: a Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 30. Motley and Baars (1979) hooked up participants to a fake electrode and asked them to read lists of non-word pairs like shad bock. The mistakes participants made in this study demonstrated that spoonerisms a. were less likely to be made by non-English speaking participants than by English speakers. b. were not context driven or affected by the type of experimental situation that subjects found themselves in. c. were very difficult to manipulate experimentally. d. can be primed by context and its effects on the mental state of the subject.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 31. While speaking to a friend you accidentally say, “I left my keys by the drawer” instead of “I left my keys in the drawer.” This kind of error is referred to as a a. mixed error. b. speech error. c. spoonerism. d. semantic error.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 32. Which kind of links would allow for phonetic information to affect the lemma during speech production? a. Unidirectional b. Bidirectional c. Lateral d. Omnidirectional Answer: b Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Short Answer 1. Freud’s notion that errors of speech are caused by repressed thoughts was not empirically supported, yet many people accept this notion. Defend the idea that “Freudian Slips,” in which the intended word is replaced by an entirely different one, have a different origin.

Answer: Psycholinguists have demonstrated that because the lexicon involves many connections among various words and the sounds they are associated with, errors often occur when the activation of the intended word spreads through the lexicon and results in the activation of other words that are similar in sound or meaning. For example, we might call a sibling by the wrong name, especially if we have a number of them and were thinking of a different one just prior to speaking; or we might replace one name, such as Obama, with another that is phonetically very similar, such as Osama. Most of the time, we end up uttering the correct word, but in rare situations, these partially activated words might actually be more common or salient than the intended word, or they might be composed of phonemes that are more common, which can cause an unintended word to be activated more quickly than the intended word was, and we misspeak.

Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 2. What might disfluencies or pauses in speech tell us about the speaker’s intentions or language processing? Can we know what those intentions and processes are?

Answer: Pauses between words in spoken language indicate that the speaker may be engaging in some type of cognitive processing. They may also signify a more socially driven hesitation, such as weighing how different statements may be received by the hearer. The speaker may be planning how to continue expressing an idea, searching for the best word for an intended meaning or deciding on how to proceed based on the cues from one’s partner. We often draw inferences about what we think is going on when a person displays gaps or disfluencies, but we cannot really know for sure. Specific techniques, including analysis of speech errors or the effects of priming techniques, help us to understand the probable sources of a disfluency, though in real-life situations, there may be several contributing factors that are hard to disentangle.

Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 3. What can be learned from studying pauses in naturally occurring speech? How did Smith and Wheeldon’s 1999 study, in which participants were asked to describe which objects on a screen moved and to where, contribute to and advance our understanding of speech planning beyond the study of naturally occurring pauses?

Answer: Speakers plan some but not all of a sentence before they begin to utter it, therefore a certain amount of planning has to be done while uttering the sentence. Investigating pauses between words in a sentence and between conversational turns involving two or more partners reveals when and how much pre-planning may be occurring at various points during spoken language production. For example, long pauses are especially likely at clause boundaries, suggesting that a good deal of pre-planning occurs there. However, by manipulating specific aspects of grammatical structure, Smith and Wheeldon’s study addressed more precisely how far ahead speakers pre-plan their sentences. Specifically, they found that participants paused longer before beginning to utter a sentence with a long and complex subject but a simple direct object than a sentence with a simple subject but a long and complex direct object. Since these sentences

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

are equally complex overall, and presumably require an equal amount of time overall to plan, these results suggest that speakers pre-plan the entire subject before beginning to speak but plan the object after they have begun to utter the sentence.

Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 4. How might we account for our perception that speakers of different languages seem to have varied patterns and timings of turn-taking in conversations?

Answer: The evidence suggests that most languages conform to a surprisingly universal conversational gap length. It is possible that we perceive the conversational gap in some languages or cultures to be different from our own because there are isolated instances when their conversational gaps may be longer or shorter than the ones to which we are habituated.

Because we are very sensitive to the length of conversational gaps, these instances may be exaggerated in our perception. Similarly, these examples may stand out in our memories, creating the perception that another speakers’ conversational pace is very different from our own, even when it is largely the same.

Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 5. Is the meaning of a word activated together with its sounds during production? Describe at least one source of evidence that supports your argument.

Answer: (Answers may vary; an answer that refers to one of the following sources of evidence may be considered complete.) Activation of a word appears to be divided into two stages: activation of its lemma, which contains the semantic and syntactic information associated with that word; and activation of its sounds at a later stage. Evidence for this comes from the tip-ofthe-tongue (TOT) state, in which a speaker has accessed the lemma and knows that there is a specific word to express a particular concept, but has failed to fully or even partially activate its sounds. Additional evidence comes from patterns of speech errors that show that word exchanges are clearly distinct from errors involving exchanges of sounds. When two words in a sentence are swapped, the distance between them may be substantial, and the two words are almost always of the same syntactic category. However, sound exchanges usually take place between adjacent or nearly adjacent words, and are often not of the same syntactic category. This suggests that in planning a sentence, speakers can “look” further ahead when retrieving a word’s lemma than when retrieving its sounds. Finally, there is experimental evidence for separate stages involving lemmas and sounds. For example, the study by Meyer (1996) showed that the time to begin uttering a sentence was affected by the presentation of a distractor word that was phonetically similar to the first noun in the speaker’s sentence, but not by the presentation of a distractor word that was phonetically similar to the second noun. In contrast, the presentation of a distractor word that was semantically similar to either the first or second noun affected time to begin speaking. Again, this suggests that speakers plan quite far ahead when retrieving lemmas but that accessing the sounds of words occurs at a later stage.

Textbook Reference: 10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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6. Based on the experiment by Warriner and Humphreys (2008), what is a possible consequence of spending a long time in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state when trying to produce a particular word?

Answer: Warriner and Humphreys (2008) reported that when people experience a TOT state and try to activate the words they are missing for longer than 10 seconds, they are more likely to slip into a TOT state with the same word when they attempt to retrieve it in the future compared with a person who retrieved the word within 10 seconds. This happens whether the researcher gives participants the answer or they successfully retrieve the word on their own. Therefore, persisting in a TOT state makes one more likely to experience a TOT state for that same word in the future.

Textbook Reference: 10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 7. Describe two different possible real-world contexts that might affect the timecourse of activating the lemma, words, and articulation.

Answer: This answer may be anything involving priming a particular item/location thus drawing attention to it and activating the lemma, word, and articulation before a fully formed conceptualization has been formed.

Textbook Reference: 10.3 Formulating Messages Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 8. Bock (1986a) used priming sentences to investigate the influence of previously spoken sentence forms on speakers’ syntactic choices. Gries (2005) evaluated a large corpus of natural language transcripts to investigate whether certain syntactic forms were more likely to occur if the same structure had been used previously. Using these two studies, relate the importance of laboratory and real-world investigations of language. How do these two studies complement and inform each other?

Answer: Although conducting controlled studies in the laboratory is necessary in order to control variables and isolate discrete mechanisms of language production, evaluating spoken language in natural settings provides us with a variety of opportunities to investigate whether those processes actually occur in the real world. Bock’s research on syntactic priming describes how being prompted to produce certain structures can affect the choice of sentence structure we choose to use in subsequent speech. Gries’ analysis of real world speech confirmed Bock’s theory and demonstrated its relevance to real-world communication by showing that this pattern is evident across a variety of situations in which many different variables may be influencing speakers’ choices. Furthermore, because he was able to observe thousands of sentences, Gries found that the priming effect was highly variable depending on the particular verb used in the sentence, with some verbs occurring primarily in one structure or another and resisting any priming effects. Hence, using a large corpus can help to identify important variables that experimenters may not have thought to manipulate.

Textbook Reference: 10.4 Structuring Sentences Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 9. Do our choices of sentence structure have an effect on our future and long-term use of those structures? Provide support for your answer.

Answer: Yes, priming studies have shown that when participants are prompted to produce specific syntactic structures in the laboratory, they are more likely to use those same sentence

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

structures in forming spontaneous sentences a short time later. Corpus studies have also shown that using certain structures in our daily speech and writing makes it more likely that we will produce them again. The continued use of our own past unique patterns of language seems to have an effect on the types of syntax we choose to use when expressing ourselves in both speech and writing. Such patterns may be stable enough over time to allow researchers and forensic scientists to use writing samples that are known to be a particular author’s to evaluate the origins of writing samples whose authorship is in question.

Textbook Reference: 10.4 Structuring Sentences Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 10. Design an experiment using the SLIP (spoonerisms of laboratory-induced predisposition) technique to investigate if the rates of sound swapping errors differ for words that have phonetically similar (big dog) versus phonetically different (big log) onset sounds. Note the important variables you have controlled for.

Answer: Using the SLIP technique, subjects would see items from two conditions: interference and test words with similar sounding onsets or interference and test words with different sounding word onsets.

For the similar condition, subjects would be asked to silently read these interference sets: big dog bill does and be asked to read aloud the target: dill bot Conversely, for the different sounding onsets, the interference sets would include: big log bill load and subjects would be asked to read aloud: lid boss Keeping the first word of each interference set the same and changing only the second would help to control for variables other than the critical manipulation of similar or different starting sounds. In addition, exchanging sounds in the target pair results in words rather than non-words in both conditions, which controls for the effects of lexical bias. Also, the vowels in both conditions are the same, which controls for the effects of phonetic environment.

Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 11. Describe the evidence for self-monitoring in avoiding spoonerisms. How does selfmonitoring provide a possible explanation for the lexical bias effect?

Answer: In the 1992 study by Motley, Camden, and Baars, participants took part in a SLIP study in which half of the target pairs were designed so that a spoonerism would result in an embarrassing, socially taboo phrase, whereas the other half were designed to yield a neutral spoonerism. Participants were more likely to exchange sounds if the resulting phrase was neutral.

This suggests that they were catching and censoring potentially embarrassing speech errors, a conclusion that is supported by the fact that subjects took longer and showed evidence of anxiety when pronouncing the target pair that could lead to an embarrassing spoonerism. The mechanism of self-monitoring offers a possible explanation for the fact that speech errors that result in nonwords are less likely than those that result in real words. Self-monitoring allows the speaker to

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

catch and filter out mistakes—in this case, rather than filtering out embarrassing mistakes, the speaker filters out mistakes that lead to nonsensical syllables.

Textbook Reference: 10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 11: Discourse and Inference Multiple Choice 1. Enraged at flubbing a penalty kick, Delilah kicked the soccer ball directly at her opponent’s head, giving her a severe concussion. The victim’s father, observing from the sidelines, immediately pulled out his cellphone to have a big bouquet of flowers sent to Delilah’s mother.

This passage poses difficulty for the reader because a. it contains many stops and starts, typically found in spoken language. b. it uses complex and potentially ambiguous grammatical structures that are difficult to parse. c. the obscure and uncommon words used by the author require expert knowledge in medicine and soccer to understand. d. the sequence of the sentences does not allow the reader to create a plausible mental model of the situation and how the components are related to one another.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 2. Which statement corresponds to the propositional content of Jürgen killed Bethany’s husband? a. Jürgen murdered Bethany’s spouse. b. The man who Bethany married was killed by Jürgen. c. Jürgen will probably be punished for killing Bethany’s husband. d. Jürgen wanted Bethany’s husband out of the way so he could be with her.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 3. Sonja put on a hat but was wearing no gloves when she left the house.

Based on MacDonald and Just’s 1989 study using negated and non-negated words, after reading the sentence above, subjects would likely on a memory task. a. respond faster to gloves than to hat as a probe b. remember gloves but forget hat c. respond as quickly to gloves as to hat as a probe d. respond slower to gloves than to hat as a probe Answer: d Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 4. Zwaan (1996) presented subjects with sentences describing a sequence of two events that were separated in time, as in either (1) or (2) shown here: © 2019 Oxford University Press

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

1. John ate the cookies he’d baked. A minute later, he decided to eat the pie too.

2. John ate the cookies he’d baked. Two hours later, he decided to eat the pie too.

If participants were later asked whether the word cookies appeared in the passage, a. they would respond yes faster if they had read passage 1 than if they had read passage 2. b. they would not recall that the word cookies appeared at all if they had read passage 2. c. they would respond yes slower if they had read passage 1 than if they had read passage 2. d. about half of them would not recall that the word cookies appeared in either passage.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 5. As Sophie stood still, skimming the bookshelf for the stolen antique volume, the old door to the parlor creaked and squealed and footsteps echoed through the room.

Reading this sentence would likely activate a. the visual and tactile processing systems in the brain. b. only the visual processing system. c. the visual and auditory processing systems. d. only the auditory processing system.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 6. Selena is considered a “low imager” and Amit a “high imager,” based on their results on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ). If they both read a story about a couple hiking along a coastal path, would recall more details from the story and have a reading time. a. Amit; longer b. Amit; shorter d. Selena; longer c. Selena; shorter Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 7. John Bransford and colleagues (1972) designed a study to investigate how readily subjects detected slight changes in nearly identical sentences that were presented to subjects with a time lag. Their results demonstrated that a. participants detected changes in the specific forms of sentences more often than changes in the mental models they evoked. b. participants detected changes more often if the two sentence evoked different mental models. c. memory for syntax is more stable over time than memory for meaning. d. memory for the content of mental models is just as stable over time as memory for syntactic forms.

Answer: b

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 8. Researchers have noted that many children who appear to have been reading well in the third grade show a dip in reading performance in the fourth grade. This may be explained by a. the effect of nutrition on cognitive development at this critical age. b. the fact that many children whose families cannot afford the extra reading support provided by private tutors fall behind their peers. c. children’s increased sensitivity to peer expectations and cultural norms that devalue reading. d. the fact that as texts get more complex, they require not only strong decoding skills but also strong general knowledge about the topics of the texts.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 9. In the Dari/Farsi language, the same pronoun is used when referring to either a man or a woman. This is because a. the language is spoken by cultures in which a distinct pronoun for females is not valued. b. Dari/Farsi is a young language that has not yet developed pronouns to distinguish between males and females. c. pronouns inherently tend to contain very little information because they are used in contexts where their meanings are easily inferred. d. Dari/Farsi is spoken by many non-native speakers, resulting in the simplification of its grammar.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 11.2 Pronoun Problems Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 10. A survey of pronoun systems across various spoken languages indicates that a. some languages may drop pronouns entirely, but this never occurs with third-person pronouns. b. most languages avoid any possibility of ambiguity in their pronouns. c. gender and number tend to be marked more often on third-person pronouns than on firstperson pronouns. d. many languages do not have second-person pronouns.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 11.2 Pronoun Problems Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 11. In the sentence Tim watched the baby as he rocked him in his arms, the antecedent of his is a. grammatically unambiguous. b. grammatically ambiguous but disambiguated by information present in the mental model. c. grammatically ambiguous but disambiguated by information present in the mental model and the use of a cleft sentence. d. extremely difficult for a hearer or reader to disambiguate because of competing cues.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 11.2 Pronoun Problems

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 12. Which pair of sentences would likely cause a repeated-name penalty? a. Tommy seems quite intelligent. Tommy studied with the Jesuit priests. b. Tommy named his daughter Ayeesha. Ayeesha was the name of his mother. c. Tommy gave Lee a new book. Lee enjoyed it. d. Tommy studied with the Jesuits. The Jesuits encouraged scholarship.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.2 Pronoun Problems Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 13. Consider the sentence, The deer was shot right in the heart by the hunter. If this were changed to It was the hunter who shot the deer right in the heart, this would a. increase the likelihood that using the phrase the hunter in the following sentence would result in a repeated-name penalty. b. eliminate the possibility of any repeated-name penalty in a sentence that followed it. c. enhance the salience of the heart. d. enhance the salience of the deer.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.2 Pronoun Problems Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 14. In the wh-cleft sentence, What the batter hit during that fateful game was the ball, the focused element is a. the batter. b. hit. c. that fateful game. d. the ball.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 11.2 Pronoun Problems Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 15. In Jennifer Arnold’s 2001 study evaluating the content of Canadian Parliamentary discourse, the researcher found that speakers often focused on the a. goal or endpoint of an event rather than its source or origin. b. source or origin of an event rather than the goal or endpoint. c. process associated with an event. d. individual associated with the cause of an event.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.2 Pronoun Problems Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 16. Refer to the figure.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

In these graphs from Arnold et al.’s 2000 study showing the effect of manipulations of grammatical gender marking and order of mention, the eye-fixation data indicate that a. hearers had no difficulty correctly interpreting the pronoun in any of the conditions. b. order of mention was a more effective disambiguating cue than gender marking. c. hearers were able to make use of the gender marking cue more quickly than the order of mention cue. d. under certain circumstances, hearers experienced persistent difficulty in correctly interpreting the pronoun.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 11.3 Pronouns in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 17. In Arnold et al.’s 2000 study, discourse prominence was manipulated by varying the a. attractiveness of characters referred to in the stories. b. social status of the speaker who recorded the stories. c. syntactic position of an antecedent in the sentence. d. frequency of use or commonality of an antecedent.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 11.3 Pronouns in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 18. Refer to the figure.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Malika has just turned 3 years old, and Laura is 25 years old. Would Malika’s eye-fixation latencies for pronouns differ from Laura’s if both had been shown the figure above? a. Malika and Laura would both fixate on Mr. Biggs within about 200 milliseconds of the end of the pronoun. b. It would take Malika significantly longer to fixate on Mr. Biggs than it would take for Laura to do the same. c. Malika would not be able to identify Mr. Biggs as the antecedent, but Laura would. d. Malika and Laura would both fixate on Mr. Biggs in about 3 seconds.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 11.3 Pronouns in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 19. In an eye-tracking experiment, upon hearing the word herself in the sentence Julia watched as her mother made herself a dress, a 6-year-old child would look at the picture(s) of and an adult would look at . a. the mother; the mother b. both Julia and the mother; only the mother c. both Julia and the mother; both Julia and the mother d. the dress; either Julia or the mother Answer: b Textbook Reference: 11.3 Pronouns in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 20. In the sentence, Bianca claimed that Samantha voted for her, her can only refer to Bianca, not to Samantha. This illustrates the role of in pronoun resolution. a. discourse prominence b. order of mention

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c. binding constraints d. thematic roles Answer: c Textbook Reference: 11.3 Pronouns in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 21. Based on Black and Bern’s 1981 findings, which pair of sentences is most likely to be remembered as one complex sentence? a. Abdul felt very weak and collapsed at the pool. He was carried away on a stretcher by paramedics. b. Abdul swam very hard at morning training and became exhausted. He was carried away on a stretcher by paramedics. c. Abdul swam an extra long time to prepare for his meet. He was carried away on a stretcher by paramedics. d. Abdul had begun training for his swim meet. He was carried away on a stretcher by paramedics.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 22. Subjects who read would subsequently demonstrate the shortest reading times for the sentence, Betsy picked up the popsicle stick and put it in the trash. a. The popsicle stick flew out the car window. b. The popsicle stick fell on the floor. c. The popsicle stick was glued onto the paper. d. The popsicle stick was stained green.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 23. The Kuleshov effect is to film viewing as is to language comprehension. a. bridging inference b. presupposition c. pronoun resolution d. a mental model Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 24. Carlos has stopped running because of a tear in his meniscus.

In the preceding sentence, a(n) conveys that Carlos has been running in the past. a. elaborative inference b. presupposition c. antecedent d. proposition Answer: b

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Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 25. Carlos has stopped running because of a tear in his meniscus.

If you read the preceding sentence and did not know that Carlos was a runner, you would alter your mental representation of him to include the notion that he used to go running. This process is called a. a predictive inference. b. the reverse cohesion effect. c. accommodation. d. a presupposition.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 26. Which statement illustrates the use of a presupposition by a political candidate to convince listeners that an achievement of hers is widely accepted and agreed upon by the public? a. “I lowered interest rates and two months later, unemployment was down by 2 percent.” b. “Someone is responsible for successfully negotiating that trade agreement, and that someone is me.” c. “Everyone agrees that my policies have lowered crime rates across the country.” d. “The twenty-thousand deaths that my new program prevented would all have occurred under my opponent’s policy.”

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 27. Presuppositions have been used to induce , leading researchers to ask critical questions about potential problems in the questioning of eyewitnesses. a. false memories b. predictive inferences c. ambiguity d. lying Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 28. In Tracy Linderholm’s study of predictive inference, participants read passages that strongly suggested the possibility of a certain event, and then read a sentence that was either consistent or inconsistent with that event. She found that subjects’ affected the likelihood that they would compute an inference, as evidenced by longer reading times for the inconsistent sentences. a. reading ability b. long-term memory c. working-memory capacity d. speed of processing Answer: c

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Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 29. Written material that makes the connections between sentences very explicit, minimizing the number of inferences that must be made by the reader in order to understand the text, a. is always read more slowly than one that leaves connections implicit. b. is sometimes remembered less accurately than one that leaves connections implicit. c. is found more often in novels than in textbooks because novelists have stronger writing skills than most academics. d. results in a more rewarding literary experience, sparking the reader’s interest to a greater extent.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 30. Glucksberg and colleagues observed that people had trouble rejecting literally false sentences if they made sense metaphorically—e.g., Some jobs are jails. This shows that: a. metaphors may be interpreted automatically, much like literal statements. b. readers have difficulty understanding metaphors because they are literally false. c. there is no interference between the true nature of the metaphorical meaning and the false nature of the literal meaning. d. people make no attempt to interpret non-literally when it doesn’t make sense to do so.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 11.5 Understanding Metaphor Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 31. Consider the sentence, Stella thought the man at the restaurant was a pig. According to Glucksberg and Keysar (1990), most of us understand the meaning of this metaphor because a. some people physically resemble pigs. b. we are considering a superordinate-level category of pig qualities. c. we quickly consider and reject as absurd the possibility that the man is literally a pig. d, it is common to hear men referred to as pigs.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 11.5 Understanding Metaphor Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 32. Consider the sentence, Stella thought the man at the restaurant was a pig. Kintsch (2000) might say that most of us understand the meaning of this metaphor because a. we consider the basic-level category of pig qualities. b. some people physically resemble pigs. c. we suppress some information related to pig and boost other information. d. the word pig and man are often used together in sentences.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 11.5 Understanding Metaphor Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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33. Consider the sentence, The football player was like a bulldozer. Gentner (1983) has theorized that understanding such metaphors relies on our ability to a. reject the literal meaning of the sentence. b. find the meaning in the literal meaning of the sentence. c. apply characteristics of a bulldozer to a football player. d. recognize overlap between conceptual structures related to football players and bulldozers.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 11.5 Understanding Metaphor Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 34. The major theories of how people understand a sentence containing a metaphor predict that successful interpretation depends on a. consideration and rejection of the literal meaning of the metaphor. b. suppression of some information about the sentence and heightening of other information. c. use of inflexible categories of meaning. d. frequent use of metaphors in their own speech.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 11.5 Understanding Metaphor Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Short Answer 1. Refer to the table and figure.

The images represent (A) stimuli and (C) results from MacDonald and Just’s 1989 study. The graph shows subjects’ response times for a positive response to the question of whether a target word was present in a previously read sentence. What were the researchers testing, and what do the results suggest about how meaning is encoded in memory? Explain your answer.

Answer: The researchers tested whether people’s memory for meanings involves abstract symbolic representations, such as propositions, or life-like mental models of situations that are described by sentences. Subjects read sentences in which one noun was negated but another was not, such as Almost every weekend, Elizabeth baked no bread but only cookies. The proposition that corresponds to this sentence includes a representation of both bread and cookies, whereas the corresponding mental model involves cookies, but not bread, because no bread exists in the

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situation described by the sentence. The researchers hypothesized that it would take subjects longer to respond to words on a memory task if they had been negated because its absence from the mental model would make it less accessible in memory. This did, in fact, occur, indicating that subjects had formed a mental model that included the non-negated item (e.g., cookies) but did not include a negated item (e.g., bread). Hence, it appears that mental models, rather than propositions, are the primary means of encoding meaning in memory.

Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 2. Seth put his sandwich in the fridge and started drinking the milk on the counter. Seth took his sandwich out of the fridge and started drinking the milk on the counter.

Following Glenberg et al.’s 1987 memory probe study, predict what would occur if such a technique were applied to the sentences above. Describe the implications of the predicted memory findings for how mental models are formed.

Answer: Glenberg et al. found that when a sentence described a situation that spatially separated the object from the subject of the sentence, like in the first sentence where the sandwich is separated from Seth, research subjects formed a metal model where the object, in this case the word sandwich, was less accessible in memory than when the object was not separated from the subject, like in the second sentence where Seth is reunited with the sandwich. So we would predict that when asked to recall if sandwich was a word in either of the two sentences, subjects would correctly answer more quickly for the second sentence than the first sentence because the subject of the mental model (Seth) is directly connected to his sandwich in the second sentence, but not the first. This suggests that mental models don’t just capture information about which entities are present in a situation, but that the accessibility of the entities that are present shifts depending on their relationship to the entity in focus.

Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 3. Using the methods discussed in Chapter 11, design an experiment investigating whether cliffhangers help viewers recall the storyline of a TV show better than season endings that do not contain cliffhangers. Predict the outcome of your study and explain how it would contribute to our understanding of mental models.

Answer: You might ask subjects to read brief synopses of scripts from TV show episodes that end in cliffhangers and ones that do not. A month later, you could then administer memory tests to both groups probing for recall of story lines and themes. For example, you might use an unstructured memory task to ask them to freely recall as many events as they can, or a more structured memory task in which they have to respond to descriptions of events and indicate as quickly as possible whether those events had occurred in the script. In this case, we would predict that those who read a script ending in a cliffhanger would have better recall in terms of the amount of detail remembered or how quickly they remembered it. This may be because people tend to keep a model that contains unresolved goals and events “open” in memory so they can incorporate the final details later. This study would allow us to identify whether experiencing closure does, in fact, reduce the accessibility of material in a mental model, thus facilitating forgetting.

Textbook Reference: 11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating

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4. What advice would you give a budding writer about minimizing ambiguities in her writing regarding pronouns and their antecedents?

Answer: Pronouns are a useful linguistic device for referring to antecedents that are assumed to be highly accessible in a reader’s mental model. Therefore, you should make sure that the antecedent is in fact highly accessible or salient before using a pronoun to refer to it. This is especially true if there is more than one antecedent that is grammatically consistent with your pronoun and plausible as an antecedent, such as using the pronoun he when there is more than one possible male antecedent that could be involved in the event you are describing. Several factors affect the accessibility of an antecedent: 1) The antecedent must not be too far away from the pronoun, especially if the pronoun appears in a different sentence.

2) Generally, the subject of a sentence is a more accessible antecedent than an object.

3) Antecedents that appear in positions of focus in constructions like cleft sentences or wh-clefts are more accessible than ones that appear outside of these privileged positions.

4) Antecedents that correspond to the goals or endpoints of events are generally more accessible than those that correspond to origins of events.

If an antecedent is not highly accessible, as determined by these factors, you should consider repeating its name rather than using a pronoun to refer to it.

Textbook Reference: 11.2 Pronoun Problems Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 5. Refer to the figure.

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If you were a participant in Arnold et al.’s 2000 study, which of the four figures depicted would cause the most confusion regarding the antecedent of the pronoun? Explain your answer.

Answer: Arnold and her colleagues found that grammatical gender is a primary disambiguator, and thus panels C and D would not be candidates for confusion because only one male character is present as a possible antecedent for the pronoun he. Panel A would also be less likely to create confusion because Mr. Biggs is the prominent discourse entity because he is the subject of the first sentence, a position that increases the salience of an antecedent. So, B should cause the most

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confusion (and it does, based on eye-tracking data). Here, the referent of the pronoun is the less prominent entity (Tom), who is the same gender as Mr. Biggs, and Mr. Biggs is a viable and in fact a more likely potential antecedent for the pronoun he.

Textbook Reference: 11.3 Pronouns in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 6. How do young children and adults differ in their processes of resolving ambiguous pronouns?

Answer: Based on eye-gaze evidence, children as young as two are able to identify the prominent referent in a story as the best candidate for a grammatically ambiguous pronoun. This is evidenced by the fact that they are more likely to look at a prominent referent (in subject position) rather than a less prominent one (in object position) upon hearing the pronoun.

However, a pronounced difference exists in the time course between adult and young children’s eye fixations. Young children tend to take longer, about 3 seconds, to fixate on the correct referent, whereas the average time for adults is about 200 milliseconds from the end of the pronoun. Furthermore, even children as old as 6–9 years of age do not use information about binding constraints as efficiently as adults to guide their interpretation of grammatically ambiguous pronouns or reflexives.

Textbook Reference: 11.3 Pronouns in Real Time Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 7. As an experimenter, what are some methods you could use to analyze the nature of the bridging inferences in the following sentence pairs? What conclusions might you draw from your analysis? (a) Hector broke his mom’s vase. He used some adhesive to glue it back together. (b) Hector was moving his mom’s vase. He used some adhesive to glue it back together.

Answer: To assess bridging inferences, we could compare how long it takes subjects to read the second sentence in each pair: He used some adhesive to glue it back together. We would likely find that it takes subjects longer to read the second sentence in (b) than in (a), suggesting that they are doing more mental work to figure out the connection between the two sentences. We can also ask subjects to recall each pair of sentences after a set time. If subjects recall the first pair (a) as a single complex sentence more often than they do the information presented in pair (b), then we have evidence that subjects see the events described in the two sentences as more closely connected in the first pair of sentences than in the second.

Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 8. Imagine you were called to serve as a jury member in a trial. During the trial, a police officer testifies that when she arrived on the scene, she asked several bystanders, “Did you see the man in the blue jacket that shot the child?” One bystander answered “yes” and later gave police a description of the shooter. Given what you know about the effect of presuppositions on our longterm memory, describe your concerns about how the bystander was questioned.

Answer: Researchers such as Loftus, Fiedler, and Walthier have shown that asking subjects leading questions that contain presuppositions can change or affect their memory of an event sometime after the experience. In this situation, the police officer presupposed that there was a man wearing a blue jacket at the crime scene who shot the child. Although it is possible that the

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witness saw a shooter of this description, it is also possible that the witness’ mental model was retroactively altered to accommodate a male shooter wearing a blue jacket.

Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 9. If you were writing a speech, how could you use presuppositions to make the argument that a particular crosswalk is necessary due to the large number of accidents that have occurred at that intersection?

Answer: (Answers may vary. An example sentence akin to either style presented herein constitutes a correct response; rationales should reflect those given here.) The inherent danger of the intersection may have already led to a high number of vehicular accidents as well as pedestrian injuries and possibly fatalities. Instead of asserting that such accidents have occurred, you might include them in your argument in the form of a presupposition, as in the sentence Considering the 31 accidents that occurred last year at the corner of 5th and Main, it is imperative that an official crosswalk be placed at the intersection. This would lead the audience to assume that the number of accidents that occurred at the intersection is not in dispute.

An even more powerful use of presuppositions would involve presupposing the need for a crosswalk as well as the number of accidents that have occurred. This could be done in a statement such as the following: The urgent need for a crosswalk at the intersection of 5th and Main, which could have prevented the 31 accidents that occurred there last year, has been ignored by city council.

Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 10. Consider these sentences: (a) Aleksy was wondering whether to ask Beryl to marry him when he suddenly saw a shooting star. (b) Aleksy was wondering whether to ask Beryl to marry him when his phone suddenly rang. (c) Aleksy then dropped to one knee holding a ring. (d) Aleksy turned around and got into his car.

As a researcher, how would you use sentences (b), (c), and (d) to evaluate subjects’ predictive inferences after they read sentence (a)? Identify an inference to test, and describe the task subjects would perform and specific predictions of the results.

Answer: Many people would equate a shooting star with a romantic sign and it is therefore reasonable to expect Aleksy to propose rather than walk away upon reading (a). To see whether readers spontaneously generate this expectation when they read (a), we need to use the control sentence in (b), in which this inference is not expected to arise. The experiment would be organized as follows: Participants read pairs of sentences, organized into four conditions: (a–c), (a–d), (b–c), and (b–d). The critical measure is how long it takes subjects to read the second sentences, and comparing these times to the conditions of having read (a) or (b) as the first sentence. If they have inferred that Aleksy is going to ask Beryl to marry him, then reading (d), which is inconsistent with this inference, should take longer than reading (c), which is consistent with it. This difference is expected to occur only if subjects first read (a), and not if they read (b).

The use of sentence (b) as an alternative first sentence is necessary to control for the possibility that sentence (d) could be read slower than (c) for reasons that have nothing to do with the

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inference. If no such difference occurs when (b) is the first sentence, but a difference does arise when (a) is the first sentence, we can conclude that this difference is due to the generation of the predictive inference.

Textbook Reference: 11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 11. Franz performs extremely well on the Stroop task, quickly and accurately saying “green” to the word blue printed in green ink. Seth, however, performs poorly, showing a failure to ignore irrelevant information about the word’s meaning. Given this difference, predict how the two subjects would compare in their speed of interpreting the statement, That billboard is a wart.

Explain the basis of your reasoning.

Answer: I would expect Franz to interpret “That billboard is a wart” faster than Seth. I expect this because his good cognitive control may help resolve interference between literal and metaphorical interpretations of a sentence.

Textbook Reference: 11.5 Understanding Metaphor Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 12: The Social Side of Language Multiple Choice 1. If you want to teach your 8-month-old infant to learn to differentiate sounds used in Swahili, what would be the best method for delivering the lessons on those distinctions? a. Have your infant watch videos of someone speaking to them in Swahili. b. Have your infant listen to natural language recordings of someone speaking Swahili. c. Have you infant engage in live, interactive play with someone who is speaking Swahili to them. d. Have your infant watch two older children playing and talking with each other in Swahili.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 2. When an infant takes a pedagogical stance, her learning a. is limited to information that she is able to process at a conscious level. b. is enhanced by her sensitivity to cues that the speaker is attempting to teach her something. c. occurs slowly at first, but with good retention in the long run. d. occurs most quickly when the speaker is a professionally trained teacher.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 3. Refer to the figure.

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The graph from Kuhl et al.’s 2003 study on social gating shows that babies raised by Englishspeaking parents whose training in Mandarin was limited to auditory exposure were a. better able to distinguish between Mandarin sounds than children from English-speaking households who received training in English. b. as able to distinguish between Mandarin sounds as children from Mandarin-speaking households who received no training at all. c. as unable to distinguish between Mandarin sounds as children from English-speaking households who received no training at all. d. as able to distinguish between Mandarin sounds as children from English-speaking households who were exposed to Mandarin by a live speaker.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 4. Which finding would provide evidence to suggest that social gating occurs in non-human animals? a. Dolphins only click when other dolphins are present. b. Birds only learn songs from other birds, not from songs presented over speakers. c. Dogs only learn to bark from their parents, not from other dogs they interact with. d. Parrots can learn phrases by watching television.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 5. Which evidence would suggest that a chimpanzee is able to adopt a pedagogical stance? a. The chimpanzee imitates a human using a tool to retrieve food more readily than imitating another chimpanzee. b. The chimpanzee uses a string to lower a platform with food, and this action is immediately imitated by a younger chimpanzee.

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c. The chimpanzee is unable to learn language except when it is taught as part of a structured curriculum. d. The chimpanzee learns more quickly from a human who is trying to teach it to unlock a door than from observing the human perform the same action.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 6. Based on the study by Sabbagh and Baldwin (2001), a 3-year-old child would be least likely to learn a new word from someone a. who did not show any excitement when producing the word. b. the child had never met before. c. who expressed hesitation about the meaning of the word. d. who was bilingual.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 7. Eighteen-month-old Herby plays with his mom who is holding two toys: a bear and a truck.

His mom leaves the room and returns to find Herby now has a new toy, a monkey. How is Herby likely to react if his mom asks in an excited voice for him to hand her “that,” without specifying exactly which object(s) she is asking for? a. Herby will look confused until she points directly to the object she wants. b. Herby will likely hand her the bear first and then the truck if the bear does not satisfy her request. c. Herby will likely hand her the bear first, then the truck if the bear does not satisfy her request, and then the monkey. d. Herby will likely hand her the monkey.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 4. Applying 8. A can be used to evaluate if a child can shift their perspective of a situation from their own to that of another person. a. false-belief test b. false-belief test or a referential communication task c. social gating task d. social gating task or a lexical decision task Answer: b Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 9. Refer to the figure.

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You could conclude that the child in this figure is able to adopt the perspective of his conversational partner if he a. immediately looks at the taller glass when the speaker says “Pick up the glass.” b. looks at both glasses when the speaker says “Pick up the glass” and then asks “Which one?” c. says “Pick up the tall glass” if he wants the glass on the right. d. points if he wants either of the glasses.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 10. Consider the referential communication experiment by Deutsch and Pechmann (1982). If subjects were shown a display that included a large pink block, a large blue block, and a small pink block, a preschooler would say “the large pink block” and a nine-year-old would when referring to the large pink block. a. usually; almost always say “the large block” b. usually; always say “the large pink block” c. almost never; always say “the large pink block” d. almost never; sometimes say “the large block” Answer: d Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics? © 2019 Oxford University Press

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 11. Which circumstance would be most advantageous in helping a deaf child develop a theory of mind? a. Being able to converse with native signers who use complex sentences that include mental state verbs b. Being taught to sign by hearing parents who are native speakers of a language other than the sign language they share with their child c. Teaching sign language to a younger, deaf sibling whose knowledge of sign language is different from the older child’s d. Learning to lip-read speech uttered by native speakers of English who have no knowledge of sign language Answer: a Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 12. Young children’s difficulties taking another person’s perspective during communication may be due in part to a. lack of a fully developed explicit mind-reading system. b. inefficient language skills that prevent them from describing a point of view other than their own. c. immature cognitive control that cannot resolve the clash between their own perspective and their partner’s perspective. d. a lack of desire to develop beyond egocentrism.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 13. If your roommate states, “I’d really love some Chinese takeout food this evening, but I don’t have time to go get it,” you might interpret this as a request for you to pick up the food. This is an example of what philosopher H. Paul Grice referred to as a. a false-belief test. b. conversational implicature. c. using the linguistic code. d. referential communication.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 14. Which characteristic is not considered one of H. Paul Grice’s maxims of conversation? a. Clarity b. Relation c. Manner d. Quantity Answer: a

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Textbook Reference: 12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 15. A scalar implicature arises when the sentence is understood to mean . a. We should hire Raj because he has a degree in psychology; the other candidates do not have a degree in psychology b. Go see if the beef stew at Table 7 wants anything to drink; go see if the man who ordered beef stew wants anything to drink. c. Donna enjoys eating some vegetables; that Donna does not enjoy eating all vegetables. d. I went to bed at ten and lay there horizontally for eight hours; I went to bed but I did not sleep for all, or even most, of the eight hours I lay there.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 16. Studies often seem to show that young children cannot make conversational inferences, but in these experiments, this apparent failure may actually be a product of a. the use of methods that require children to consciously reflect on their interpretations. b. children being tested by unfamiliar conversational partners. c. children not understanding that conversation is cooperative in nature. d. children not understanding the meanings of the words used in the experiment.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 17. When subjects are asked to judge whether sentences are true or false, probing for the meaning of the sentences produces longer response latencies than probing for their meaning. a. pragmatic; semantic b. semantic; pragmatic c. intended; unintended d. unintended; intended Answer: a Textbook Reference: 12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 18. In the experiment by De Neys and Schaekan (2007), subjects were tested for their ability to compute the pragmatic meaning of sentences such as Some tuna are fish while keeping a dot pattern in memory. They found that subjects a. were more likely to respond that the sentence was true than that it was false, regardless of how complex the dot pattern was. b. were more likely to respond that the sentence was false when the dot pattern was simple than when it was complex. c. were more likely to respond that the sentence was true when the dot pattern was simple than when it was complex. d. consistently judged the sentence as false, regardless of how complex the dot pattern was.

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Answer: b Textbook Reference: 12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 19. Which response would most likely lead to activation in the brain regions associated with theory of mind processes? a. Maria heard the front door slam as her husband came in from shoveling snow. She quickly hid her diary under the mattress in fear. b. New Jersey was pummeled with snow, and John spent the morning shoveling the driveway before coming in for a cup of coffee. c. Maria was reading a textbook as her husband shoveled snow from their driveway. He came in to take a break. d. Maria purchased a novel at her favorite bookstore and then she met her friend for coffee.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 20. Which linguistic behavior shows evidence of audience design? a. In planning a potentially ambiguous sentence, a speaker always orders a shorter phrase before a longer phrase. b. A valedictorian practices her speech repeatedly until she is able to deliver it without any disfluencies. c. A speaker provides more detail in referring to a person his conversational partner has never met than in referring to a mutual friend. d. A political candidate speaks at a lower pitch in order to sound more authoritative to voters.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 21. Based on the Ferreira et al. (2005) study, you would expect a speaker to a. reliably use an adjective or a modifying phrase to refer to a novel object. b. rarely use an adjective or a modifying phrase to refer to a novel object. c. reliably use an adjective or a modifying phrase when using an ambiguous word such as bill. d. reliably use an adjective or a modifying phrase to refer to one of two bowls.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 22. In a 2000 study, Ferreira and Dell investigated speakers’ strategies of using disambiguating grammatical words. Based on their results, a speaker would be most likely to insert disambiguating words (shown in parentheses) in the sentence The woman (who was) sent the flowers was delighted if the a. speaker had previously encountered difficulty interpreting an ambiguous sentence. b. speaker encountered some delay in planning the word sent. c. speaker was addressing a non-native speaker of English. d. sentence would otherwise result in confusion for the listener.

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Answer: b Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 23. Imagine you are discussing a movie you’ve seen in which police break down a suspect’s door with a beer keg. In describing the scene, you would be a. less likely to mention what was used to break down the door if a battering ram had been used. b. more likely to mention what was used to break down the door if a battering ram had been used. c. more likely to mention what was used to break down the door than if a battering ram had been used, but only if your conversational partner had also seen the movie. d. less likely to mention what was used to break down the door than if a battering ram had been used, but only if your conversational partner had also seen the movie.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 24. Which scenario describes back-channel responses? a. A conversation where the listener is following a complicated story and interrupts the speaker with questions to make sure she has understood the details b. A conversation where the listener has heard the story being told by the speaker on several previous occasions but is doing his best to stay alert and seem interested in the story c. A conversation where the speaker is trying to use non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and hand movements to emphasize the important parts of a story to the listener d. A conversation where the speaker is using practiced gestures to recount an important story that she has told on several previous occasions Answer: a Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 25. Brown and Dell’s 1987 study found that speakers did not take into consideration their partner’s knowledge of a story in deciding how much detail to include in retelling it; however, the 2002 study by Brennan and Lockridge found that they did. Which is a plausible explanation for this discrepancy in results? a. Hearers in the Brennan and Lockridge study were familiar to the speakers, so speakers exerted more effort in considering their perspective. b. Hearers in the Brennan and Lockridge study showed less interest in the stories, so the speaker had to include more detail to hold their attention. c. Speakers in the Brennan and Lockridge study had described the same story many times before, and were therefore able to pay more attention to the hearer’s perspective. d. Hearers in the Brennan and Lockridge study had not heard the stories before and likely produced back-channel responses that clarified their level of comprehension.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

26. Which response implies the speaker believes he has established a conceptual pact involving the word bain-marie between himself and his partner? a. What is a bain-marie? Well, it is a cooking technique. b. Pour the water halfway into the pan. Then put in the casserole dish. c. Is the bain-marie steaming? Good, put in the soufflé. d. Can you please explain to me what a bain-marie is?

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 12.4 Dialogue Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 27. In Brennan and Clark’s 1996 study investigating how subjects establish common ground during conversation, which scenario provides evidence for a conceptual pact between the speaker and their partner?

The speaker describes an object using an adjective to distinguish it from other objects of the same category. The next time, when that same object is presented as the only exemplar of that category, the speaker a. leaves off the adjective he had used earlier when speaking to the same listener. b. uses the same detailed expression even when speaking to the same listener. c. uses the same detailed expression he used earlier as he speaks to a new listener. d. leaves off the adjective he had used earlier as he speaks to a new listener.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 12.4 Dialogue Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 28. Which statement captures the diverging predictions made by Brennan and Clark’s notion of conceptual pacts (B&C) and Pickering and Garrod’s interactive alignment model (P&G)? a. B&C predict that conversational partners will converge on similar referring expressions whereas P&G do not. b. Both B&C and P&G predict that speakers will rely on knowledge of a partner’s previous experiences, but P&G believe this information will be accessed more quickly than do B&C. c. B&C predict that speakers will readily override their own previous experiences with language to adapt to a new conversational partner, whereas P&G do not. d. B&C predict that back-channel responses will not affect speakers’ choices of referring expressions, whereas P&G predict that they will.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 12.4 Dialogue Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 29. An egocentric perspective is most closely aligned with the generation. a. ease-of-production b. audience design c. scalar implicature d. pedagogic stance Answer: a Textbook Reference: 12.4 Dialogue

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perspective of language

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 30. Compared to children diagnosed with ASD, typically developing children were found to a. be worse at recognizing when conversational norms had been violated. b. score about the same on tasks where they had to identify if conversational norms had been violated. c. be better at recognizing when conversational norms had been violated. d. be better at identifying violations of conversational norms related to the maxim of Relevance but worse at identifying violations related to the maxim of Quantity.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 12.4 Dialogue Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Short Answer 1. What is social gating, and how does it relate to language learning? What are some possible explanations for the social gating effect observed in language learning by infants?

Answer: Social gating refers to the enhancement of learning through social interaction. In the context of language learning, live interaction between the learner and the teacher appears to be important; infants learn new sound distinctions more effectively in person than by watching videos or listening to audio lessons, in which the opportunity for social exchange is missing. It has been hypothesized that this is because the physical presence of the teacher provides additional stimulation and motivation due to the social nature of the interaction and the attention the infant receives from the adult. Additionally, babies may have greater opportunity to discern the referential intentions of a live speaker based on cues such as eye contact and gaze direction, allowing them to parse the speech stream more effectively. Finally, the presence of a live speaker may encourage children to adopt a pedagogical stance, which is a particularly receptive mindset that humans appear to slip into when they recognize that a speaker intends to teach them something.

Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. Are humans the only species to exhibit social gating? Provide evidence to support your conclusion.

Answer: It seems that other animals are able to benefit from and are affected by live interactions with peers when learning to communicate vocally. In a study of European starlings, for example, birds were raised under three conditions: Some were raised with adults. Some were raised only with peers. Some were raised in isolation. Sounds from an adult group were piped into the enclosures of the groups with no adults present, so that all of the birds were auditorily exposed to mature birdsong. The group raised in the presence of the adults produced birdsong that was more mature and better reflected the structure of the adult birdsong than the other two groups. This suggests that social gating in learning is not limited to humans and that live interactions with “teachers” also enhances learning in other species.

Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 3. What are pedagogical interactions, and how are they different from other types of social interactions that humans experience?

Answer: Pedagogical interactions are communicative situations in which one individual’s goal is to impart information to one or more other individuals. Such situations need not be in a formal educational setting. Pedagogical interactions tend to differ from other types of social interactions in a number of ways. For instance, the individual acting as a teacher tends to behave differently when the object of the interaction is to impart important information to the learner. Examples of such behavior include: taking care to ensure that the learner understands the teacher’s intentions by repeating certain actions or words; establishing eye contact at critical moments; pausing to allow the learner to absorb complex information; and querying the learner to confirm that the information has been received. The learner also takes on a receptive stance, directing attention to incoming information to a greater extent than they might in a casual social interaction.

Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 4. What is the goal of a false-belief test, and what are its essential components? Design your own version of a false-belief test and predict the outcome for children of various ages.

Answer: The goal of a false-belief test is to investigate whether a child can understand that another person, who has been exposed to different experiences or information, may hold beliefs that are different from the child’s own beliefs. It involves a scenario where a child is initially provided with some information leading to an initial belief, is then shown some new information that requires a revision of that belief, and finally, is asked about the belief of another person who has not received the new information. For example, you could show children of different ages that a box with images of cookies on the outside in fact contains marbles inside, and not cookies as would be expected based on the visual packaging. Next, ask the children what someone who has not been shown the contents of the box will guess is inside the box. In this study, we would predict children younger than 4 years of age would be more likely to guess that the other person would say “marbles,” whereas children over 4 would guess that the other person would say “cookies.” This would suggest that the very young children have not developed a strong theory of mind and cannot easily take on another person’s perspective.

Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 5. Explain what theory of mind is, and describe an intervention that would help a child develop this ability.

Answer: Theory of mind (TOM) is the ability to place oneself in the mindset of another person and understand that others may have beliefs, intentions, and emotions that are different from one’s own. In general, a rich social environment may be expected to naturally foster this ability, exposing children to many situations that require awareness of another person’s mental state or degree of knowledge. However, a targeted intervention with a focused linguistic component may be especially helpful. It has been found that theory of mind is related to the mastery of complex language skills that are used to describe the mental states of others through verbs such as know, think, believe, and so on. Therefore, a particularly helpful approach might be to read children stories that focus on characters’ mental states, emotions, or beliefs, and to discuss these stories by asking children questions such as “How do you think Billy feels?” and “Does Mama Bear know where her baby is?”

Textbook Reference: 12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

Bloom’s Level: 6. Creating 6. Refer to the figure.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Julie Sedivy and colleagues (1999) conducted an eye-tracking study using the above visual display and the instruction “Pick up the tall glass.” What conclusions regarding the role of conversational inference can be drawn from the results of this study? Include a description of the results in your answer.

Answer: The scenes were designed to create temporary ambiguity for subjects upon hearing “Pick up the tall…” because there are two objects that could be described as tall—the glass in the upper right hand corner and the pitcher in the lower right hand corner. In one condition (A), a shorter glass was also present. If subjects expect that the speaker is following the maxim of Quantity and providing as much and no more information than is necessary, they should infer that tall is referring to the glass, because the adjective is necessary to distinguish the taller glass from the shorter glass, whereas the pitcher could unambiguously be referred to as simply the pitcher. The results of the experiment showed that subjects were in fact making such an inference while interpreting the ambiguous phrase: Subjects were faster at locating the correct glass and less likely to look at the pitcher when viewing A than when viewing B, in which there was no principled reason for the speaker to include an adjective in reference to the glass or the pitcher. These results demonstrate that conversational inferences can be computed quickly enough to resolve temporary ambiguities in spoken language understanding.

Textbook Reference: 12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating © 2019 Oxford University Press

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

7. Refer to the figure.

The figure shows three conditions in Ferreira et al.’s 2005 study in which researchers used a referential task to investigate ambiguity in language production. Using the panels, briefly summarize the study’s main findings and what they imply about the ability of speakers to anticipate and avoid potential comprehension difficulties for the listener.

Answer: The researchers found that subjects almost always included additional information with a noun when it referred to one of two objects of the same category (such as the small and large bats in A) but often did not include additional language to differentiate between homophones (such as the flying bat and the baseball bat in B). The findings suggest that during language production, we are attuned to potential ambiguities that arise from having insufficient conceptual content in the utterance, but less so to potential ambiguities that arise from the selection of homophonous words (words with more than one meaning). This may be because the planning of conceptual content and selection of words involve separate processes that occur at different stages of language production; the cognitive demands on the speaker may be different at each of these two stages.

Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 8. Refer to the table.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

In a 2004 study, Jennifer Arnold and her colleagues investigated how subjects dealt with ambiguity and syntactic planning in sentence production. Briefly explain the logic of the experimental design, and determine whether the outcome supports the audience design hypothesis.

Answer: In the stimulus sentences, speakers have a choice about whether to place the direct object (e.g., Grant’s letters to Lincoln) before the indirect object (to a museum in Philadelphia), as in sentences A and C, or after, as in sentences B and D. If speakers are attuned to potential syntactic ambiguities that might arise for hearers and plan their sentences in order to avoid these ambiguities, then we would expect them to be especially motivated to move the direct object to the end of the sentence when doing so would avoid a potential ambiguity (B versus A) in comparison to a situation where either version of the sentence would be unambiguous (D versus C). However, this is not what the researchers found. Instead, the tendency to move the direct object to the end of the sentence was even greater for the sentences with no potential ambiguity.

This suggests that speakers’ syntactic choices are not driven by audience design and that factors other than the avoidance of ambiguity drive the planning of the structure of the sentence.

Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 9. Based on the evidence presented in this chapter, what might a student do to encourage a professor to include the appropriate level of detail in their explanations?

Answer: We have seen that a hearer’s back-channel responses tend to influence the speaker’s choice of how much detail to include in speech. These back-channel responses may be affirmative in nature, signaling that one has understood the speaker’s meaning and is prepared to move on. Such affirmative cues may include body language cues, such as head nodding, or vocal affirmations, such as “ok” and “aha.” Conversely, puzzled looks, cocks of the head, or explicit requests for clarification can signal confusion and are effective in conveying that the lecturer has said something confusing that could benefit from additional explanation.

Textbook Reference: 12.3 Audience Design Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

10. Refer to the figure.

Using the figure, explain how Brennan and Clark (1996) arrived at the idea that conversational partners enter a conceptual pact during the course of their exchange.

Answer: The figure represents stimuli from Brennan and Clark’s study, in which subjects had to describe to each other how to arrange the cards. The researchers observed the types of labels, basic level (e.g., dog) or subordinate level (e.g., cocker spaniel), that partners used throughout the task. In some situations, using a subordinate level label (cocker spaniel vs. Dalmatian) was necessary to help differentiate two cards with similar objects, such as the two types of dogs in B. Once a partner used a subordinate level label for an object, they tended to stick to using that same label even when the cards did not necessitate the distinction, such as in set A, in which only one type of dog card is shown. The researchers described this apparent agreement to continue to use the same descriptor as a conceptual pact between the conversational partners.

Textbook Reference: 12.4 Dialogue Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

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Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Second Edition Julie Sedivy

Chapter 13: Language Diversity Multiple Choice 1. Mark Pagel (2000) suggests that linguistic diversity began to decline from its peak with the rise of societies. a. nomadic b. agricultural c. matriarchal d. geographically isolated Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.1 What do Languages Have in Common?

Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 2. Which of these examples of Greenberg’s linguistic universals can be defined as implicational?

1. In declarative sentences with normal subject and object, the dominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object.

31. If either the subject or object noun agrees with the verb in gender, then the adjective always agrees with the noun in gender.

37. A language never has more gender categories in nonsingular numbers than in the singular.

42. All languages have pronoun categories involving at least three persons and two numbers. a. 1 b. 31 c. 37 d. 42 Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.1 What do Languages Have in Common?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 3. Greenberg’s work (1963) on linguistic universals suggests that a. all human languages exhibit Hockett’s design features of language, but otherwise vary without constraint. b. the sound structure of languages is more variable than the syntax. c. there are only 30 different grammars found across all human languages. d. the patterns found across languages make up a small subset of logically possible patterns.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 13.1 What do Languages Have in Common?

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

4. Which scenario involving two communities, one that speaks language A and another that speaks language B, that have come into contact with each other is most probable? a. The two languages, for which there are very few people who speak both A and B, borrow words from each other but retain most of their own syntax. b. The two languages, which are similar, influence each other’s word order but resist borrowing words from each other. c. The two languages are dissimilar, with A borrowing heavily from the sound structure of B, and B borrowing heavily from the syntax of A. d. The two languages, which are dissimilar, mix together their sound structure and syntax so heavily as to become nearly indistinguishable.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 13.1 What do Languages Have in Common?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 5. A pattern that is common across many languages likely reflects an underlying cognitive constraint on language learning if the pattern a. pertains to syntactic structure. b. is common mainly among languages in Southeastern Africa. c. is found in a number of languages that are historically and geographically unrelated. d. is found mainly among languages within the Indo-European family.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 6. In order to evaluate language learning in adults and children, Kam and Newport (2005) developed an artificial language that used determiners (like the or a in English) only 60% of the time. The researchers found that most a. adults used determiners 100% of the time, whereas most children produced them 60% of the time. b. children used determiners 100% of the time when the language was simple, but 60% of the time when the language was complex. c. adults used determiners 60% of the time when the language was simple, but 100% of the time when the language was complex. d. adults and children used determiners 100% of the time when the language was simple and 60% of the time when the language was complex.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 7. Greenberg’s universal 18 holds that in languages where adjectives come before nouns, numerals usually do as well. To test whether this pattern has a cognitive basis, Culbertson et al.

(2012) devised an artificial language in which subjects were presented with inconsistent word orders. Which of the following distributions resulted in subjects being least likely to reproduce the most frequent word orders? a. Adjective-Noun: 70%; Noun-Adjective: 30%; Numeral-Noun: 70%; Noun-Numeral: 30%

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b. Adjective-Noun: 30%; Noun-Adjective: 70%; Numeral-Noun: 30%; Noun-Numeral: 70% c. Adjective-Noun: 30%; Noun-Adjective: 70%; Numeral-Noun: 70%; Noun-Numeral: 30% d. Adjective-Noun: 70%; Noun-Adjective: 30%; Numeral-Noun: 30%; Noun-Numeral: 70% Answer: d Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 8. Which method would be best for investigating the hypothesis that language universals arise from cognitive constraints? a. Compile similarities and differences across all natural languages spoken and determine which patterns are most common. b. Track the evolution of languages to distinguish between old (e.g., Latin) and young (e.g., Nicaraguan Sign Language) languages, and evaluate whether young or old languages are easier to learn. c. Evaluate whether certain patterns are learned more readily than others in artificial languages, and whether these correspond to common patterns found across languages. d. Track the migratory patterns related to various languages and determine which language communities have the highest rates of language disorders.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 9. Suffixes are more common than prefixes cross-linguistically. If you wanted to test the hypothesis that this pattern is rooted in general cognitive constraints, following the logic of Hupp et al. (2009), you would predict that subjects would classify the sequence of symbols &* as being more similar to a. %&* than to &*%. b. &*% than to %&*. c. %&* than to &*% but only for speakers of languages other than English. d. &*% than to %&* but only for speakers of English.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 10. The most common word orders across languages are subject-object-verb and subject-verbobject. A plausible explanation for this is a. the relative accessibility of animate nouns during language production. b. the tendency to produce the longest element of a sentence at the end. c. that word recognition during language comprehension occurs more quickly for animate nouns, which tend to occur as subjects, than for inanimate nouns. d. that animate nouns, which tend to occur as subjects, are more readily learned by children than inanimate nouns.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

11. are morphemes attached to words to help identify grammatical roles such as subject, object, and indirect object. a. Classifiers b. Prefixes c. Case markers d. Honorifics Answer: c Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 12. In languages with differential case marking, applying case marking to most helpful for avoiding ambiguity. a. animate subjects b. animate objects c. abstract subjects d. concrete objects Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding

would be

13. Fedzechkina et al. (2012) created an artificial language that allowed both SOV and OSV word orders and used case markers to indicate subjects and objects; however, these case markers were applied inconsistently and were randomly distributed between animate and inanimate objects. After four training sessions, learners used case markers , suggesting that their language learning was driven by . a. on all objects, whether animate or inanimate; regularization b. on inanimate objects; avoidance of ambiguity c. randomly on animate and inanimate objects; ease of production d. on animate objects; a balance between ease of production and avoidance of ambiguity Answer: d Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 14. What is the most plausible reason for the diverse number of color names across languages? a. Some groups of individuals, geographically isolated from others, have developed mutations that result in different color-differentiation abilities and thus do not have words that distinguish certain colors, such as greens from blues. b. Some languages have relatively few words for colors because they do not place importance on labeling color as a property of objects, given that color is generally predictable from the category membership of the object. c. Some cultures group colors with other concepts or categories, such as using the same word to convey blue as well as broom, so the number of different color names is more difficult to identify due to this translation challenge. d. Some language communities have borrowed color terms from other languages, adding new terms to their original inventory of color names.

Answer: b

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 15. What is the most plausible explanation for the fact that English speakers distinguish between the words in and on, whereas Spanish speakers use a single word en to encompass both? a. Historically, English speakers have lived in a more spatially complex environment than Spanish speakers, requiring them to make a greater number of spatial distinctions. b. In general, English-speaking cultures value precision to a greater extent than Spanish-speaking cultures. c. Over time, changes in sound have resulted in two separate Spanish words being pronounced the same. d. No plausible explanation exists, suggesting that the match between concepts and words in a particular culture may be arbitrary to some extent.

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 16. Kay and Kempton’s 1984 study investigated judgments of color similarity by speakers of English and speakers of Tarahumara, a language that does not have separate names for blue and green. They found that English speakers a. differentiated less clearly than Tarahumara speakers between two colors that would be labeled blue and green in English. b. differentiated more clearly than Tarahumara speakers between two colors that would be labeled blue and green in English. c. had similar judgments to Tarahumara speakers regarding the difference between two colors that would be labeled blue and green in English. d. varied considerably regarding the difference between two colors that would be labeled blue and green in English, whereas speakers of Tarahumara consistently judged them to be slightly different.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 17. What important methodological improvement did the study by Winawer et al. (2007) make over Kay and Kempton’s 1984 study? a. Winawer et al. compared speakers of Russian and English, a more valid comparison than Kay and Kempton’s comparison between Tarahumara and English speakers. b. Winawer et al. compared judgments between different shades of colors that would be called blue in English, which is a more subtle color comparison than Kay and Kempton’s comparison between colors that would be called green and blue in English. c. Winawer et al. conducted their experiment in the United States, a population that yields more stable experimental results than the Mexican population studied by Kay and Kempton. d. Winawer et al. used a reaction time task, allowing them to more plausibly study automatic processes related to color perception than the similarity judgment task used by Kay and Kempton.

Answer: d

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 18. Experiments showing that Whorfian effects are diminished or eliminated when the linguistic system is inhibited provide a. strong and conclusive evidence that speakers of different languages perceive the world differently. b. some evidence for the causal role of language on perception, but suggest that perceptual differences between speakers of different languages are limited. c. strong evidence that language is shaped by perception rather than the other way around. d. no evidence one way or another regarding the relationship between language and perception.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 19. In Gilbert et al.’s 2006 hemispheric activation study of color perception, subjects with intact brains would be sensitive to the effects of language when the stimuli were presented to their visual field(s). a. less; right b. more; right c. variably; left d. equally; right or left Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 20. Which statement regarding Gilbert et al.’s 2008 study, using visual stimuli in which an oddball animal appeared among several identical animals to test subjects with intact brains and one split brain patient, is true? a. The split-brain patient’s results did not support a close link between language and perception because she showed an even greater difference than the other subjects in how her right and left hemispheres responded to the oddball animal exemplars. b. The split-brain patient’s results provided further support for a close link between language and perception because she showed an even greater difference than the other subjects in how her right and left hemispheres responded to the oddball animal exemplars. c. The split-brain patient’s results did not support a close link between language and perception because the split-brain patient showed no difference in how her right and left hemispheres responded to the oddball animal exemplars. d. The split-brain patient’s results provided further support for a close link between language and perception because, like the other subjects, the split-brain patient showed no difference in how her right and left hemispheres responded to the oddball animal exemplars.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

21. Anna Papafragou and her colleagues (2008) found that, depending on the language they spoke, participants were more likely to focus on either the endpoint of a path or the manner of the motion of a moving object or person, but this difference only occurred when participants were first asked to pay attention to the scene a. and the gender of the actor. b. in order to verbally describe it later. c. in order to complete a memory test about it later. d. in order to draw it from memory later.

Answer: b Textbook Reference: 13.4 Language Structure and the Connection between Culture and Mind Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 22. Trueswell and Papafragou (2010) found that when subjects were asked to count aloud as they watched a video, eye gaze differences between Greek and English speakers were compared with a task in which subjects freely viewed the video. a. eliminated b. enhanced c. no different d. reversed Answer: a Textbook Reference: 13.4 Language Structure and the Connection between Culture and Mind Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 23. After watching a video of a man unintentionally breaking a vase, a native Spanish speaker would be likely than a native English speaker to recall the person who did it because, in Spanish, . a. less; the agent is less likely to be included in the sentence describing the event b. less; there is no word for “accountability” c. more; the agent is less likely to be included in the sentence describing the event d. more; there is no word for “accountability” Answer: a Textbook Reference: 13.4 Language Structure and the Connection between Culture and Mind Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 24. Language X has few motion verbs that encode manner (e.g., walking, strolling, jogging, etc.) and many motion verbs that encode path (e.g., going, coming). In an experiment in which subjects were presented with a picture of a police officer running toward an injured child, speakers of Language X would likely spend time looking at the child than English speakers, but only . a. less; if they had to simultaneously perform a linguistic task such as repeating their name over and over b. more; if they had to simultaneously perform a linguistic task such as repeating their name over and over c. less; if they were told they would later have to describe the event to another subject d. more; if they were told they would later have to describe the event to another subject Answer: d

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Textbook Reference: 13.4 Language Structure and the Connection between Culture and Mind Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 25. Why might bilinguals engage in code-switching, even though it can be cognitively costly? a. It may help speakers communicate what is most conceptually accessible in their minds. b. They rarely do, and only in urgent situations in which one language is insufficient to communicate vital information. c. They cannot help it—bilinguals have very little control over their two languages. d. They do so to communicate information that does not exist in one of the two languages they speak.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 13.5 One Mind, Two Languages Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 26. Athanasopoulos et al. (2010) found that native Greek speakers are faster than native English speakers at distinguishing between certain shades of blue. Furthermore, comparing Greeks who had lived in the UK, away from Greece, for short times versus long times showed that a. the groups were equally fast at distinguishing these particular color swatches. b. the long-stay group was faster at distinguishing these particular color swatches. c. the short-stay group was faster at distinguishing these particular color swatches. d. both groups had lost their ability to quickly distinguish these particular color swatches.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 13.5 One Mind, Two Languages Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering 27. What can be inferred from the findings of studies that investigated how specific languages can influence specific cognitive processes? a. Auditory exposure to a tonal language in early life can enhance a person’s perception of pitch. b. Auditory exposure to a tonal language, whether in early life or later, can enhance a person’s perception of pitch. c. Mastery of a tonal language can enhance a person’s perception of pitch. d. There is no evidence that experience with a tonal language can enhance a person’s perception of pitch.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 13.5 One Mind, Two Languages Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 28. Evidence for cultural priming is provided by which study’s outcomes? a. Trueswell and Papafragou’s 2010 study with Greek and English speakers who watched videos of complex events. b. Winawer et al.’s 2007 study using English and Russian speakers who differentiated between gradients of the color blue. c. Hupp et al.’s 2009 study of English speakers who judged non-linguistic phrases such as ta-tee and bee-ta-tee. d. Dirk Akkermans et al.’s 2010 study using Dutch and English speakers who played the prisoner’s dilemma game.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Answer: d Textbook Reference: 13.5 One Mind, Two Languages Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 29. Which of the following is not a plausible explanation for Keith Chen’s 2013 finding that countries where people tend to save less money for their futures tend to also be countries where people speak a language that requires the future tense to be grammatically marked? a. The use of a grammatical marker to indicate the future focuses the attention of speakers on the future. b. The association is due to cultural priming of certain behaviors rather than arising from a direct relationship between grammar and behavior. c. This association is simply a coincidence; these two variables are positively correlated because an assortment of unrelated linguistic and cultural characteristics may spread among neighboring populations. d. A grammatical distinction between the present and the future encourages people to conceptualize their present and futures lives as discontinuous.

Answer: a Textbook Reference: 13.5 One Mind, Two Languages Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 30. John McWhorter proposes that some languages are less complex than others because a. the cultures or people who speak them are more primitive. b. they have been long isolated from other languages by geographic boundaries. c. they are younger languages. d. their speakers are less motivated to choose complex linguistic forms and thus the complex structures have disappeared from those languages.

Answer: c Textbook Reference: 13.5 One Mind, Two Languages Bloom’s Level: 1. Remembering

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Short Answer 1. Is the number of languages growing or shrinking across our planet? What are some possible reasons for the change?

Answer: Language extinction seems to be occurring across most parts of the planet because there are fewer and fewer geographically and culturally isolated communities. Due to the rise of industrialization and globalization, most societies now have to interact with others. In such situations, it is common for the languages that are widely spoken by economically powerful groups to swallow the local languages spoken by smaller and less powerful language communities because the incentives to learn the dominant language become stronger while the rewards for learning local languages diminish as a result of this cross-cultural contact.

Textbook Reference: 13.1 What do Languages Have in Common?

Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying 2. Refer to the figure.

The figure represents the geographic distribution of languages based on their verb/object relationships and use of prepositions versus postpositions. What do the frequencies and geographic distribution of these linguistic characteristics suggest about the relationship between verb-object order and the use of pre- versus postpositions?

Answer: First of all, the map shows that the combinations of OV order/postpositions and VO order/prepositions are much more common than the other two combinations, suggesting that there might be an inherent connection between verb/object order and the use of prepositions versus postpositions. However, a closer look indicates that the most common language types are not evenly distributed around the globe, but tend to cluster together within geographic regions.

This suggests that the common geographies and histories shared by speakers may contribute to these languages having similar characteristics related to verb/object order and preferences for © 2019 Oxford University Press

Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

pre- versus postpositions. For instance, the many languages in Africa that share VO and prepositions may have shared a common ancestral tongue, the basic rules of which carried forward through time. It is also possible that being close to each other physically and having a reason to communicate, such as commerce or war, may have caused languages to adopt similar structures. This makes it less likely that there is an intrinsic connection between verb/object order and choice of pre- versus postpositions or that such a connection reflects universal constraints on language learning.

Textbook Reference: 13.1 What do Languages Have in Common?

Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 3. Why is the study of language typology relevant to the debates about language nativism? What can and cannot be concluded on the basis of crosslinguistic evidence?

Answer: Crosslinguistic surveys of language reveal that certain linguistic patterns are found much more commonly across languages than others. This is consistent with the nativist hypothesis, which states that humans are genetically predisposed to learn certain kinds of language structure. However, other explanations for such patterns must be ruled out. For example, certain common patterns may have accidentally arisen due to a shared history or cultural contact among a large number of languages. Moreover, even if certain patterns do reflect learning biases, these biases may not be specifically linguistic in nature, and they may not be specific to humans. Therefore, typological evidence cannot provide conclusive evidence for the nativist hypothesis. However, it can serve as a useful starting point for experiments using both linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli to determine whether the most common crosslinguistic patterns are just those patterns that are especially easy for humans to learn.

Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 4. Refer to the figure.

Hupp et al. (2009) tested whether speakers of English judged sequences of symbols were most similar to a target sequence (shown in the left-hand column of the figure): a prefix + target sequence (middle column) or a target + suffix sequence (right-hand column). Summarize their findings and the conclusions that can be drawn from them, relating these to crosslinguistic patterns involving prefixes and suffixes. What would you expect to occur if the same stimuli

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

were presented to a speaker of a language in which prefixes are more common than suffixes, and what conclusions could you make based on your predicted results?

Answer: Hupp et al. (2009) reported that when English speakers were given the task above, they judged “target + suffix” sequence of symbols to be more similar to the target sequence because this sequence is visually analogous to the addition of a suffix to a word. English, like most of the world’s languages, is a suffix-preferring language. Based on Hupp et al.’s results, we cannot tell whether subjects’ responses reflect their experience with English or if they reflect universal cognitive biases that would help explain why suffixes are more common than prefixes across the world’s languages. To resolve this, speakers of a language in which prefixes are more frequent than suffixes would need to be tested. If experience with a particular language drives the results of such an experiment, then these subjects should judge “prefix + target” to be more similar to the target than “target + suffix.” However, if universal cognitive biases drive the results, then these subjects should judge the “target + suffix” sequence to be more similar to the target than “prefix + target,” just like English speakers.

Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 5. Defend the argument that production pressures may explain the most common patterns of basic word orders found across languages (SOV and SVO rather than other possible word orders).

Answer: Research in language production has demonstrated that in planning a sentence, speakers tend to produce the most accessible material first. This is because, as linguistic material is accessed by a speaker, moving it out of working memory frees up resources to plan the rest of the sentence. Some nouns, such as animate ones, seem to be inherently easier to access than others, and there is evidence that speakers tend to order animate nouns earlier in the sentence than inanimate nouns when that is a grammatical option. Given that the subject of a sentence is more often animate than inanimate, this suggests that speakers of a language with flexible word order will choose a subject-first word order more often than not. Over time, this preference on the part of speakers may solidify and become a part of the basic grammar of that language.

Textbook Reference: 13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 6. Refer to the figure.

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Based on the figure from the World Color Survey as well as other evidence presented in the chapter, decide whether color naming across languages does or does not follow common patterns. Support your answer.

Answer: While the number of basic color terms is not the same across languages, the map suggests that most of the languages surveyed seem to have between three and six common color words, indicating that similarity across languages does exist at the basic levels of color naming.

The languages that have a large number of color terms tend to be concentrated in industrialized societies, suggesting a possible link between color naming and the availability of artificial color.

There are also some general patterns related to the colors that tend to be grouped together under common names. For example, when a language has just three words to represent all colors, those words map onto the same categories across languages (e.g., white, dark, and yellow/red).

Furthermore, many languages use the same word for green and blue, and very few languages distinguish between light and dark blue. These similarities in the way language maps onto colors may be due to our shared biological ancestry or the visual mechanisms affected by it.

Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 4. Analyzing 7. Does the language a person speaks limit the kinds of thoughts they are capable of entertaining? Provide an example to support your argument.

Answer: Folk psychology holds the idea that when a language doesn’t have a specific word to refer to a concept that we cannot conceive of or think about it. However, this is not the case.

Different languages have more or less succinct ways of referring to the same things, but even if it takes more words to get at a concept, it can still be described. For example, the single German word shadenfreude refers to “the glee we feel at another’s misfortune.” Both English and German speakers are perfectly capable of understanding the idea; it is just captured with one

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

word in German. While it is plausible that the existence of a specific word in a language may make a certain concept particularly accessible, especially if the word is a common one in that language, its absence does not make that concept impossible to understand.

Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 8. Summarize Gilbert et al.’s 2008 investigation of subjects’ judgments of oddball animal exemplars. What do their findings of hemispheric differences suggest about the relationship between language and perception?

Answer: In this study, the researchers investigated how quickly subjects recognized an oddball image of an animal depending on whether the oddball was a member of the same category (one different dog among other identical dogs) or a different category (one cat among identical dogs).

They found that subjects were faster at identifying oddballs of a different category than one from the same category; however, this cross-category advantage was stronger when the objects were presented in the right visual field than in the left. Because images presented in the right visual field are processed in the left hemisphere, which is important in the retrieval of words from memory, this suggests that the activation of words associated with images (e.g., cat, dog) can affect the visual processing of these images. In particular, the activation of different words for the oddball objects and the surrounding objects facilitated subjects’ identification of the oddball objects as different from the surrounding ones.

Textbook Reference: 13.3 Words, Concepts, and Cultures Bloom’s Level: 5. Evaluating 9. Refer to the figure.

Based on the research of Papafragou et al. (2008), how would speakers of English and of Greek differ in the way they visually process a scene like the one shown here, and what is the explanation for that difference?

Answer: When examining a scene like the one shown here, an English speaker is likely to focus on the manner of the boy’s motion, and their eyes will zero in on the skateboard. A speaker of

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Test Bank for Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics 2nd Edition by Julie Sedivy

Greek is more likely to look at the net, which is the end of the path that the boy is apparently following. This difference in the way English speakers and Greek speakers view the same image is likely the result of differences in their native languages. Spoken English strongly stresses the manner in which people move; Greek, on the other hand, typically stresses the path an actor is following. This explains why English and Greek speakers begin to parse and understand visual events by focusing on that which is encoded linguistically.

Textbook Reference: 13.4 Language Structure and the Connection between Culture and Mind Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 10. Briefly explain what exoteric and esoteric languages are, and identify some possible reasons for why they differ.

Answer: An exoteric language is one spoken by large and diverse communities—for example, English. An esoteric language are spoken by small, homogenous communities. These languages tend to differ from each other in their structural features, with exoteric languages generally having simpler morphological systems. Researchers are exploring several possible reasons for these differences. For example, exoteric language communities are large and diverse, and communication often takes place over long distances, often in writing. Their speakers come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Many exoteric language speakers are non-native speakers who had to learn the language as adults, a process that differs significantly from language acquisition in childhood. Esoteric languages, on the other hand, are used in small, tightly bound communities. There are few non-native speakers of esoteric languages, meaning most speakers acquire the language as children. Most speakers share the same cultural background and experiences. Communication is often face-to-face. The different environments and circumstances in which these languages developed may have influenced their structures over time.

Textbook Reference: 13.4 Language Structure and the Connection between Culture and Mind Bloom’s Level: 2. Understanding 11. What role does implicit priming of culture play in how language affects our behavior?

Describe a study that supports this view.

Answer: Researchers argue that implicit priming, or the subconscious activation of information, can affect the way that we interpret situations and make decisions. Because languages are almost inseparably used in connection with a particular cultural setting, using a language, can activate cultural values. For example, Akkermans et al. (2010) compared the strategies of Dutch/English bilinguals when they played the prisoner’s dilemma game. The researchers found that subjects were more or less cooperative depending on which language was being spoken as they played the game, with more cooperative strategies used when the game was played in Dutch than when it was played in English. The researchers theorized that the subjects’ behavior was influenced by the more cooperative cultural norms found in non-Anglophone countries. Thus the act of speaking Dutch may have implicitly influenced the behavior of players while they were immersed in that language.

Textbook Reference: 13.5 One Mind, Two Languages Bloom’s Level: 3. Applying

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