question

Toddler Todd habitually makes up original new words. This illustrates the ____ characteristic of language. a. inventive b. bilingual c. overextension d. object scope constraint

answer

a

question

Which of these is NOT one of all languages' five universal components? a. Reinforcement b. Pragmatics c. Syntax d. Phonology

answer

a

question

When a child shows a preference for the nonsense word "blek" over "bkel," the child is showing evidence of having acquired a. knowledge about the phonology of language. b. semantic knowledge. c. syntactic knowledge. d. knowledge about pragmatics.

answer

a

question

PHONOLOGY is to SYNTAX as ____ is to ____. a. CREOLE :: PIDGIN b. SOUND :: RULE c. POLITE :: COARSE d. LISTENING :: READING

answer

b

question

SEMANTICS is to PRAGMATICS as ____ is to ____. a. MEANING :: MANNERS b. SHRIEK :: HOWL c. RANDOM :: SYSTEMATIC d. INTAKE :: OUTPUT

answer

a

question

The smallest meaningful language unit is called a a. phoneme. b. morpheme. c. holophrase. d. telegraphic statement.

answer

b

question

Molly is learning that "a" stands for the sound you hear when you say "apple" or "ant;" that "b" stands for the sound in "bat" and "ball;" and so forth. Molly is learning a. phonemes. b. morphemes. c. syntax. d. semantics.

answer

a

question

When a child advances from utterances such as "no he going" to "he not going," the child has made a gain in knowledge of a. phonology. b. syntax. c. semantics. d. pragmatics

answer

b

question

Sociolinguistic knowledge refers to a. the rules for how words and grammatical markers are to be combined. b. culturally specific rules about how a language should be structured and used in context. c. the expressed meaning of words and sentences. d. the study of the structure and development of children's language.

answer

b

question

In the Philippines, speakers move both eyebrows quickly up and down to give emphasis to what they say. This "eyebrow flash" is a type of a. pragmatic. b. morpheme. c. phonology. d. prelinguistic phase.

answer

a

question

In Malawi, Africa, people talk fast, and, during pauses, they chime in with what they think the other person will say next. This is a language a. fast-mapping. b. underextension. c. overregularization. d. pragmatic.

answer

d

question

Children around the world learn their parents' language at the same average pace. These "linguistic universals" suggest to nativists that a. language learning is based on the infantile diet. b. similar language instruction is given in all cultures. c. the brain is biologically programmed to learn language. d. empiricism best explains the learning of language.

answer

c

question

"Children acquire language through imitation and reinforcement." This is the viewpoint of a(n) a. interactionist. b. nativist. c. Piagetian cognitive developmentalist.

answer

d

question

Empiricism is LEAST able to explain which aspect of children"s language acquisition? a. Successful parental encouragement of more talking b. Development of syntax/grammar c. Flexibility regarding which language is acquired d. Deliberate parental teaching of new words to the child

answer

b

question

Nativist Noam Chomsky argued that each child is born with a language acquisition device (LAD), which a. controls attention so that language can be imitated. b. serves as an imaginary playmate, especially for boys. c. provides positive reinforcement when words are heard. d. biologically prepares the brain to process language.

answer

d

question

In nativist theories of language development, the basic rules of grammar that characterize all languages are known as a. syntax. b. LMC. c. LAD. d. universal grammar.

answer

d

question

Apes' usage of symbolic codes and sign languages rises to the level of a human at the age of a. one year. b. two and a half years. c. four years. d. six years.

answer

b

question

Chatty can talk fine, but he has trouble understanding what he hears. Which part of the brain is most likely injured? a. Hypothalamus b. Broca's area c. Wernicke's area d. Bill Clinton's "truth center"

answer

c

question

Lenneberg's sensitive-period hypothesis states that language a. is most effectively acquired during childhood. b. has a special capacity to offend others emotionally. c. is prone to being forgotten when the brain is shocked. d. enables "touchy" people to be offended easily by comments.

answer

a

question

Aphasias show less recovery in adults than in children. This fact ____ the sensitive-period hypothesis. a. supports b. is theoretically neutral toward c. obscures d. disconfirms

answer

a

question

The combination viewpoint, which partially accepts both the nativist and learning theories, is the ______ perspective. a. pidgin b. instructional c. interactionist d. holophrastic bootstrapping

answer

c

question

The interactionist perspective implies that infants are not able to use words denoting past or future until a. they are able to think about remote past or future time. b. they have learned how to read time from clocks. c. the punctuality principle is appreciated by the child. d. after the child is reminded by others to attend to time.

answer

a

question

Infants learn from parents that conversing involves taking turns when talking. This exemplifies a(n) a. environmental/social support for language development. b. phenotypic expression of a canalized genotype. c. lexical contrast constraint. d. expression of grammatical morphemes.

answer

a

question

"Baby talk" that is directed toward an infant is called a. fast-mapping free morphemes. b. morphological coo-knowledge. c. two-way semantics. d. motherese.

answer

d

question

Parents' motherese, or child-directed speech, a. quits abruptly when the toddler begins to use grammar. b. gradually includes more complex sentence constructions as the child improves language competencies. c. is triggered by hormonal changes in the mother's body. d. is flatter in vocal tone than adult-to-adult speech.

answer

b

question

"Negative evidence" in early language acquisition a. confuses the child and retards speaking. b. means that parents ignore the child's mistakes. c. means that a parent detects the child's error and helps with its correction. d. punishes the child's errors but gives emotional support.

answer

c

question

A toddler says telegraphically, "Kitty eat," and his mom then says, "Our Kitty eats food at the bowl." This is a(n) a. processing constraint. b. motherese naming explosion. c. expansion. d. recast.

answer

c

question

Caucasians in New Mexico hear much Spanish, yet they do not learn it unless they talk with Spanish speakers. This illustrates the importance of a. "feeding the pidgins." b. object scope constraint. c. morphological knowledge. d. active conversation.

answer

d

question

The idea that conversations with older companions foster language development is most like the theory of a. Piaget. b. Vygotsky. c. Erikson. d. Bandura.

answer

b

question

The infant is in the ____ during the first year of infancy. a. holophrastic phase b. primordial period c. ethereal epoch d. prelinguistic phase

answer

d

question

An infant first begins to prefer his or her own mother's voice to the voice of female strangers by the age of a. three days. b. three weeks. c. three months. d. six months.

answer

a

question

Attention to human speech can be demonstrated in infants a. during the embryonic prenatal stage. b. within days after birth. c. by the age of two months. d. by the age of six months.

answer

b

question

You are in an airport and hear three 11-month-old babies babbling, each from a different racial/ethnic background (Asian, Hispanic, and European). The babbling of each of these infants will a. sound very similar because maturation is the major determinant of language acquisition in the first year. b. consist mainly of vowel sounds because consonant sounds don't usually emerge until 12 months of age. c. consist mainly of two-word phrases (telegraphic speech). d. sound very different, with each child's babbles sounding quite similar to the language heard in the child's home.

answer

d

question

____ are the baby's earliest vocalizations other than crying, and they appear by the age of two months. a. Babbles b. Transformational lexical phonemes c. Prelinguistic fast-mappers d. Coos

answer

d

question

Five-month old Ebony is enjoying vocalizing with her mother and gets her attention by saying "bababababababa." Ebony's behavior is referred to as a. turn-taking. b. cooing. c. babbling. d. holophrasing.

answer

c

question

Identify the correct developmental sequence, from earliest to last, in the appearance of these vocalizations: a. babbles :: holophrases :: coos. b. holophrases :: babbles :: coos. c. coos :: babbles :: holophrases. d. holophrases :: coos :: babbles.

answer

c

question

The fact that coos sound the same regardless of whether the young infant can hear suggests that they a. convey self-generated meanings for adult listeners. b. develop with maturation of the brain and vocal organs. c. are a reflection of the parents' recasts and extensions. d. arise from the infant's mutual exclusivity constraint.

answer

b

question

Infants use hand gestures and facial expressions to communicate with others by the average age of a. two weeks. b. two months. c. five months. d. nine months.

answer

d

question

The goal of the infant's declarative gestures is to a. make others grant the infant's requests. b. practice telegraphic speech, leading to its mastery. c. establish the boundaries of lexical contrast constraint. d. direct others' attention toward an object or event.

answer

d

question

For infants, DECLARATIVE GESTURES are to IMPERATIVE GESTURES as ____ is to ____. a. BROCA'S AREA :: WERNICKE'S AREA b. LISTENING :: SPEAKING c. ATTENTION :: COMMAND d. COOPERATION :: COMPETITION

answer

c

question

While the infant's speech becomes increasingly proficient and complex, his or her use of gestures a. declines. b. continues at a stable level. c. changes in an erratic and unpredictable direction. d. increases.

answer

d

question

When comparing language production and language comprehension, a. there is no general pattern; development depends on the particular item or syntactic structure being factually considered. b. production and comprehension generally proceed at about the same rate. c. production is generally ahead of comprehension. d. comprehension is typically ahead of production.

answer

d

question

At the holophrastic stage of language acquisition, the one-word terms the child uses are a. simply labels for common objects or actions that occur frequently. b. typically imitations of adult words that have little meaning for the child. c. believed to be attempts to express complex or elaborate ideas with only a single word. d. the first evidence that the child's speech is rule-governed, not imitative.

answer

c

question

Little Darlene looks at the dog, points at the door, and shouts, "Go!" Darlene"s utterance is a(n) a. holophrase. b. object scope constraint. c. Wernicke-entrained free morpheme. d. pidginized recast.

answer

a

question

Some of toddlers' persistent mispronunciations are similar across languages. This implies that these errors a. are caused by inadequate parental instruction. b. result from immature development of the vocal tract. c. may be due to excessive sugar/carbohydrates in the diet. d. reflect the child's disinterest in language at this age.

answer

b

question

At age two, most children use approximately ____ words. a. 50 b. 100 c. 200 d. 2,000

answer

c

question

Children experience the "naming explosion" of rapid vocabulary expansion during the age interval of a. six to 11 months. b. 12 to 15 months. c. 18 to 24 months. d. three to four years.

answer

c

question

Most often infants' first words are a. adjectives that modify nouns' features. b. verbs that describe actions. c. connectives, such as and or but. d. nouns that refer to familiar objects.

answer

d

question

Teresa hid dad's slippers. With a smile, he waves his hands and uses baby talk to wonder where his slippers "walked off to hide." Dad shows a. multimodal motherese. b. how pidgins become changed into creoles. c. the sensitive-period hypothesis. d. the adult-age expression of vocables.

answer

a

question

Parents in individualistic cultures (e.g., the US) encourage the ____ style, while parents in collectivistic cultures (e.g., Japan) encourage the _____ style. a. expressive; expressive b. expressive; referential c. referential; expressive d. referential; referential

answer

c

question

Two-year-old Dante quickly learns new words every day by efficiently applying the technique called a. mental exercise of Wernicke's area. b. transformational grammar. c. phonemic acceleration. d. fast-mapping.

answer

d

question

Two-year-old Joey says "car" to describe his family's car, not any other. This is the word error called a. syntactical bootstrapping. b. vocabalizing. c. overextension. d. underextension.

answer

d

question

Gary, age four, understands that "gorilla" is the name of the whole animal he saw at the zoo, not the name merely of its parts This illustrates a(n) a. taxonomic constraint. b. lexical contrast constraint. c. object scope constraint. d. mutual exclusivity constraint.

answer

c

question

"If you're a monkey, then you're not also a cow." This statement illustrates the ____ constraint on word meanings. a. taxonomic b. object scope c. lexical contrast d. mutual exclusivity

answer

d

question

Hearing, "The ape held the qwaff and ate it," a child guesses that "qwaff" is a type of food from the way this new word was used. This is a. syntactical bootstrapping. b. a lexical contrast constraint. c. the binding of a free morpheme. d. a fast-mapped expressive style.

answer

a

question

"With a smile, the boy waited his turn to start to kranje." A child decides that "kranjing" is good, from the way the word was used. This illustrates a. an object scope constraint. b. a mutual exclusivity constraint. c. syntactical bootstrapping. d. a taxonomic constraint.

answer

c

question

Using "lexical contrast" to interpret the meanings of new words is best done when the child's vocabulary is a. very small, five words or less. b. moderately small, about 20 words. c. large, 200 or more. d. any number of words.

answer

c

question

Of these, the best example of telegraphic speech is a. "MY KITTY." b. "KITTY IS." c. "THE KITTY." d. "SEE KITTY."

answer

d

question

When a language uses "grammatical markers" that can be learned at young ages, then telegraphic speech a. becomes very strongly telegraphic. b. is the same as in other languages. c. is reduced because toddlers speak grammatical sentences. d. is reduced because toddlers' speech is greatly delayed.

answer

c

question

Interpreting toddlers' telegraphic speech is enhanced when the listener considers the a. context in which the speech is used. b. child's genotype for speech disability. c. child's recent history of general health. d. parents' sophistication in receptive motherese.

answer

a

question

Among the various pragmatics of early speech, the earliest of these to appear is a. clarifying their message when it seems to be misunderstood by others. b. considering the other person's knowledge on the topic. c. applying polite manners (etiquette) appropriately to the situation. d. vocal turn-taking during conversations.

answer

d

question

Which statement about American Sign Language (ASL) is FALSE? a. Deaf mothers sign to their babies in gestural ASL "motherese." b. Language areas of the brain process ASL information. c. The ASL language allows word jokes (puns). d. The ASL language lacks syntactical rules.

answer

d

question

Berko's experiment with bird-like dolls called "wugs" tested whether young children know a. the differences between vocables and recasts. b. when they express sexist, gender-biased language. c. how to describe the grammatical rules that they apply. d. that plurals in English are formed by added the "s" sound at the end of a noun.

answer

d

question

When children learn grammatical morphemes for their parents' language, the earliest ones they master are those that a. flow most smoothly through the LAD. b. are less complex in semantic or syntactic qualities. c. have been heard most often when listening. d. have been spoken most often when talking.

answer

b

question

Three-year-old Reggie says, "The mouses runned their foots into the hole." These sentence errors are called a. object scope constraints. b. lexical contrasts. c. overregularizations. d. holophrases.

answer

c

question

The overregularization error is important in the language of preschoolers because it shows that the child a. speaks a type of creole language. b. can slow down when attempting to do fast-mapping. c. communicates reciprocally with parents in motherese. d. knows a grammatical rule because it is applied.

answer

d

question

Preschoolers learn syntax rules that let them convert actual sentences into others, such as questions, imperatives, or negatives. These rules are called a. syntactical bootstrappers. b. expressive vocables. c. transformational grammar. d. recast requisitioners.

answer

c

question

During the last phase of question-asking, the child is able to ask an adult-like question such as, a. "What is mommy reading?" b. "Where mommy?" c. "Mommy here?" d. "Where mommy go?"

answer

a

question

Children first begin to speak complex sentences such as, "The boy who cried had a boo-boo," by the age of about a. one year. b. two years. c. three years. d. four years.

answer

c

question

At the end of the preschool period, five- to six-year olds a. know fewer words than adults but understand most of the grammatical rules of their language. b. demonstrate significant articulation errors. c. require schooling in order to learn proper syntax. d. rely on phrases to communicate their basic needs.

answer

a

question

The first type of relational contrast term that preschoolers express or understand is a. big vs. little. b. high vs. low. c. before vs. after. d. here vs. there.

answer

a

question

As compared to active sentences, preschoolers' comprehension of passive sentences a. ought to be studied, but this has not yet been done. b. is more prone to errors. c. is equally prone to errors. d. is less prone to errors.

answer

b

question

Two children look at their spoiled lunch and one says with a wry smile, "That looks delicious." To appreciate ironic humor, a child must understand a. mutual exclusivity constraints. b. why holophrases are spoken in the holophrastic period. c. when the language acquisition device is awake or asleep. d. illocutionary intent.

answer

d

question

Knowing when to ask the other person to explain again is a type of a. vocable pidgin. b. two-way bilingualism. c. semantic integration. d. referential communication skill.

answer

d

question

A five-year-old speaks normally when conversing with parents, but she simplifies her speech when talking to the family's immigrant house worker. This shows that a. speech should be matched to the listener's comprehension. b. coos, babbles, and vocables are spoken prior to words. c. phonology refers to a language's basic sounds. d. syntactical bootstrapping improves comprehension.

answer

a

question

A slogan of language development in middle childhood would be, a. "Cast those recasts." b. "Holophrases for holophrastics." c. "Polish up your syntax!" d. "Don't overfeed the pidgins."

answer

c

question

Ten-year-olds have a receptive vocabulary of about ____ words that they comprehend. a. 1,000 b. 10,000 c. 40,000 d. 400,000

answer

c

question

The child's morphological knowledge a. is about details of prefixes, suffixes, and other syllable modifiers that are attached to words. b. suffers under mutual exclusivity constraints. c. is maximized during the holophrastic period. d. is balanced by underextension and overextension.

answer

a

question

Grade-schoolers become good at ____, which enables them to go beyond the information received during comprehension. a. language-making capacity (LMC) b. semantic integration c. the naming explosion d. listening for creoles

answer

b

question

The child's knowledge about language and its properties is her a. object scope constraint. b. metalinguistic awareness. c. multimodal motherese. d. fast-mapping overextension.

answer

b

question

A child with a good sense of ____ will be able to think about language and comment on its properties. a. telegraphic speech b. metalinguistic awareness c. syntactical bootstrapping d. mutual exclusivity constraint

answer

b

question

Level of ____ is a strong predictor of the child's reading skill in grade school. a. holophrastic pidginization b. overextended underextension c. interest in a well-balanced diet d. phonological awareness

answer

d

question

Progress in effective communication during childhood is a. attributable to the quickening of telegraphic speech. b. mainly due to the growth of the LAD. c. mainly due to the containment of the naming explosion. d. due both to gains in cognitive skills and sociolinguistic understanding.

answer

d

question

Damaris reads to her son every night before bed. Research suggests that shared storybook reading with parents a. promotes children's phonological skills. b. promotes vocabulary growth and letter recognition. c. teaches children to be attentive. d. ensures that children will enjoy reading.

answer

b

question

Linguistic interactions among siblings generally a. enhance the language skills of younger siblings. b. interfere with linguistic advancements. c. enhance the language skills of older siblings. d. enhance language in younger and older siblings.

answer

d

question

What was the serious flaw in early studies claiming that bilingualism stunts cognitive development? a. The monolingual children prepared in advance for the tests. b. The bilinguals were given reduced bonus rewards. c. The bilinguals were immigrants whose poor command of English gave them a disadvantage during the tests. d. The bilinguals spoke complex languages such as Finnish, which occupy enormous space in the brain.

answer

c

question

The traditional prejudice against bilingualism led to the practice of a. suppressing the teaching of foreign languages in schools. b. discriminating against hiring bilingual teachers. c. printing government documents in creole. d. giving preferential hiring to bilingual immigrants.

answer

a

question

Children who are exposed to two languages prior to the age of ____ develop strong proficiencies in both. a. nine years b. six years c. three years d. one year

answer

c

question

Which of these is NOT a cognitive consequence of bilingualism? a. Appreciation that language symbols are arbitrary b. Better metalinguistic awareness c. Prolonged holophrastic period d. Higher intelligence test performance

answer

c

question

When compared with socioeconomically similar monolinguals, bilingual children a. fail to achieve normal fluency in either language. b. achieve normal levels of fluency and also gain some cognitive advantages. c. begin a slow but inevitable decline into retardation. d. suffer no cognitive deficits, but language learning is slower.

answer

b

question

The psychological advantages of bilingualism a. are absent in ethnic minority children. b. have provoked political opposition against bilingual education. c. are focused exclusively on language skills. d. generalize beyond language into cognitive functioning.

answer

d

question

The various theoretical positions on language development discussed in the text relate most closely to the _____ theme of the text. a. active child b. nature/nurture c. quantitative/qualitative d. holistic

answer

b

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