Ch 11 Language

Which property below is NOT one of the characteristics that makes human language unique?

• Grammar
• Communication
• Governed by rules
• It can convey abstract concepts

Yoda, a central character of the Star Wars movies created by George Lucas, has a distinctive way of speaking. His statement, "Afraid you will be," violates which property of the English language?

• Language involves the use of a lexicon.
• Coding is required for language.
• Language has a large lexicon
• Language has a structure that is governed by rules.

B.F. Skinner, the modern champion of behaviorism, proposed that language is learned through

• parsing
• genetic coding
• syntactic framing.
• reinforcement.

Noam Chomsky proposed that

• humans are genetically programmed to acquire and use language.
• language is learned through the mechanism of reinforcement.
• as children learn language, they produce only sentences they have heard before.
• the underlying basis of language is different across cultures.

Ron encounters the word "wanderlust" in a novel he is reading, reaches for the dictionary, and finds out this word means "desire to travel." The process of looking up unfamiliar words increases Ron's

• lexicon
• parser
• syntax
• mental set

When the front part of a sentence can be interpreted more than one way, but the end of the sentence clarifies which meaning is correct, we say that the sentence is an example of

• parsing
• temporary ambiguity
• speech segmentation
• lexical priming

The word frequency effect refers to the fact that we respond more

• slowly to low-frequency words than high-frequency words.
• slowly to letters appearing in nonwords than letters appearing in words.
• quickly to letters that appear multiple times in a word than just once in a word.
• quickly to phonemes that appear multiple times in a word than just once in a word.

Which set of stimuli would be the best selection for having people perform a lexical decision task?

• Common words "cat, boat" and uncommon words "peon, furtive"
• Concrete words "window, monkey" and abstract words "doubt, energy"
• Words "pizza, history" and nonwords "pibble, girk"
• Correctly spelled words "speech, potato" and misspelled words "speach, potatoe"

In the lexical decision task, participants are asked to

• separate a sentence into individual words.
• decide which meaning of an ambiguous sentence is correct in a specific situation.
• identify words that are contained in sentences.
• decide whether a string of letters is a word or a nonword.

Which of the following is the best example of a garden path sentence?

• Before the police stopped the Toyota disappeared into the night.
• The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the room.
• The cats won't bake.
• The Eskimos were frightened by the walrus.