Module 11 - Language

Question 1

The ability to combine words in novel ways called _______________, or _________________ has never been observed in any other species beside humans.

Answer 1

Productivity

Digital infinity

Question 2

What is the behaviourist view on language learning?

Answer 2

Language is learned based on the same kind of mechanisms as other kinds of skills through trial and error with reinforcement for correct or incorrect language as well as through modelling of other people’s language behaviour

Question 3

What is the view on language proposed by Noam Chomsky?

Answer 3

There is an innate capacity to learn language that is present prior to any actual language experience.

The basic concepts of language — words syntax, etc — do not need to be learned.

universal grammar
- a specific gene in the brain

Question 4

What is developmental verbal dyspraxia?

Answer 4

Children with mutation to the FOXP2 gene responsible for grammar maybe

Disorder that affect the ability to pronounce syllables and words.

Question 5

What is the poverty of stimulus?

Answer 5

A proposed phenomenon that states that there is insufficient data for children to learn the rules of grammar based on experience alone

Question 6

If they move as adults, they often develp limited capabilities in the language of their adopted country. This form of the language is referred to as a ________ and it typically has reduced expressive abilities and grammar relative to a native language.

Answer 6

Pidgin

Question 7

What is a creole?

Answer 7

A fully expressive novel language consisting of a combination of two preexisting languages, typically by children of immigrants who are exposed to their parents’ language alongside that of their current residence

Question 8

What is some evidence that children are born with the ability for language?

Answer 8

1. They prefer their mom’s voice
2. They can’t differentiate different languages
3. All children learn language in the same order at about the same time.

Question 9

What is one thing that can lead to accelerated language learning?

Answer 9

Child-directed speech (CDS)
Infant-directed speech (IDS

• parent or older sibling speaking directly to a child.
• using a way of speaking called motherese —> sing-song like speech cadences, exaggerated vowel pronounciations and repetition

Question 10

What are the findings of Liu’s experiment with the head-turn task, where babies are taught to turn their heads when they hear a change in speech sound?

Answer 10

The language abilities of the infants in their study were positively correlated with they mother’s use of elongated and open vowel sounds typical of motherese.

Question 11

What is the difference between phonemes and morphemes?

Answer 11

phonemes
- smallest unit of speech that can change the meaning of the words.
Ex: happy has four (h, ah, p, ee)

morphemes
- smallest meaningful units of speech. These units have to convey some meaning either on their oen or in combination.
Ex: apple and s (for apples)

Question 12

What is the phonemic restoration effect?

Answer 12

A perceptual phenomenon in which sound that is missing or obscured is still perceived if it is highly predictable

Question 13

What is the phenomenon called the Mcgurk effect?

Answer 13

It’s a phenomenon that occurs when we view the visual articulations of one phoneme while hearing the auditory signal consistent with a different phoneme.

Question 14

What were the findings of the study by Saffran on artificial made up work like letter strings?

Answer 14

Presented these strings to babies and then tested to see if they would orient more strongly towards a word versus a nonword

Oriented more towards nonword, because they found them surprising and novel. How did they know which ones are words???

ANSWER ACCORDING TP SAFFRAN
- babies and adults are statistical learners who encode the frequency with which different sounds appear together.

Question 15

What is the difference between homophones and homographs?

Answer 15

Homophones
- words that sound the same but mean different things

Homographs
- words that are written the same, but sound different or mean different things.

Question 16

What is the lexical decision task?

Answer 16

An experiment task where a string of letters is presented and you have to decide if they represent a real word or not as fast as you can

Question 17

What were the findings of Swinney’s experiment to see if people actived multiple meanings of homophones?

Answer 17

Ex: words appear, ant, spy and sky. Ant and spy both activate because they activated the meaning of the word bug previously presented. That shows that both meanings were activated when viewing the word.

Question 18

What is it called when you break up a sentence into its constituent part to consider the grammatical/syntactic structure of a sentence?

Answer 18

Parsing

Question 19

What is a garden path sentence?

Answer 19

A sentence that tends to induce the wrong parsing.

Question 20

What is the syntax-first approach?

Answer 20

A theory of language parsing that holds grammar alone is used to parse a sentence before considering other factors.

Question 21

What is the late closure principle?

Answer 21

It states that as long as it makes grammatical sense, we tend to attach incoming words to the phrase we are currently processing rather then assuming they being to a different phrase still coming up.