Exam 10: Language

Your text describes a study in which data revealed that participants attended to a cake rather than at an inedible object immediately on hearing the word eat, and before the word cake was heard. In this experiment, the __________ variable consisted of __________ data.

In one study described in your text, participants were asked to judge the grammaticality of English sentences. Participants were native Chinese or Korean speakers who had come to the United States at varying ages. Which of the following probably best approximates the correlation coefficient researchers obtained between the age at which participants entered the United States and a measure of their performance on the grammaticality task?

Jacqueline is taking part in psychological research. Her eye movements are tracked as she reads sentences. The study is most likely examining __________.

Research has compared the spatial cognition of English and Dutch speakers to that of a Mayan people whose native tongue, Tszeltal, has no language labels for "left of" or "right of." Why might the researchers have included the Dutch speakers along with the English-speakers, considering that both languages have labels for "left of" and "right of?"

In their discussion of the influence of the immediate surroundings on language interpretation, your text suggests that children lack the cognitive control to process garden path sentences effectively. This may reflect immaturity of the __________ lobe in children's brains.

Which of the following statements is FALSE regarding the results of efforts to train a range of species, such as chimpanzees, to speak?

A man is using a snake (the plumbing tool) to clear out a clogged drain, and a 3-year-old English-speaking child is watching. The child is asked, "See what this man is doing? Can you show me sebbing?" How will the child most likely respond?

According to the __________ theory of word meaning, words are bundles of semantic features.

Your text describes a study in which two-day-old babies were exposed to recordings of normal or backward speech. Blood flow in the babies' brains was measured. Dr. Lalonde wishes to replicate the study. Rather than measuring blood flow, however, Dr. Lalonde wishes to examine the brain's metabolism of glucose. What might Dr. Lalonde predict?

In English the correlation between the forms of words and their meanings is __________.

In evaluating the idea that children learn language through imitation, which of the following statements is INCORRECT?

Seven-year-olds have a better chance of recovering from aphasia (a disorder that affects language skills) than do 50-year-olds with similar brain damage. What can be said of this data?

What can one conclude from initial research on the Mayans, whose native tongue, Tzeltal, has no language labels for "left of" or "right of"?

What observation contradicts the idea that imitation is the method by which children acquire language?

Which of the following sentences is evidence against the idea that children learn language through imitation?

In one study, researchers asked participants to memorize strings of nonsense words. Some strings were short, such as rix and jag. The short strings were not made up of function morphemes. Other strings were longer, but were constructed in such a way so as to include function morphemes such as ing, ly, and est (e.g., rixing, jagly). What were the results of this study?

Which of the following is TRUE regarding blind children's ability to apply color terms?

In normal speech, words and phonemes tend to overlap one another so that the sentence we are trying to interpret is nothing more than a long string of syllables without any pauses. In cases such as these, how are we able to understand the content of the sentence?

The textbook authors describe an experiment in which researchers exposed infants who previously heard only English spoken in their home to a tape of their mothers speaking to them either approvingly or disapprovingly in German. The tape was activated while the infants played with a novel toy. What were the results of this experiment?

Regarding the claim that Inuit/Aleut languages have more words for snow, which of the following statements is TRUE?