Language

Question 1

What is langauge?

Answer 1

The meaningful arrangement of sounds.

Question 2

What is psycholinguistics?

Answer 2

The study of the psychology of language.

Question 3

What are phonemes?

Answer 3

Discrete sounds that make up words but carry no meaning, such as ee, p, or sh. Infants make these sounds when learning.

Question 4

What are morphemes?

Answer 4

Made up of phonemes; the smallest units of meaning in language; words or parts of words that have meanings. Boy and -ing are morphemes.

Question 5

What is a phrase?

Answer 5

A group of words that when put together function as a single syntactic part of a sentence. “Walking the dog.”

Question 6

What is syntax?

Answer 6

The arrangement of words into sentences as prescribed by a particular language.

Question 7

What is grammar?

Answer 7

The overall rules of the interrelationship between morphemes and syntax that make up a certain language.

Question 8

What is morphology?

Answer 8

Grammar rules; how to group morphemes.

Question 9

What is prosody?

Answer 9

Tone inflections, accents, and other aspects of pronunciation that carry meaning.

Question 10

Who is Noam Chomsky?

Answer 10

His work is most important in psycholinguistics.

Question 11

What is transformational grammar?

Answer 11

It differentiates between surface structure and deep structure in language.

Question 12

What is surface structure?

Answer 12

The way words are organized. “I studied the material for hours.” “The material was studied for hours by me.” “For hours, I studied the material.”

Question 13

What is deep structure?

Answer 13

The underlying meaning of the sentence.

Question 14

What is a language acquistion device?

Answer 14

Humans have an inborn ability to adopt generative grammar rules of the language that they often hear. “I founded the toy.” It is a nativist or genetic interpretation. Children only need to be exposed to a language in order to apply the LAD. They do not imitate, memorize, or learn through conditioning.

Question 15

What is overregularization?

Answer 15

Th overapplication of grammar rules. “I founded the toy.” “Sheeps.”

Question 16

What is overextension?

Answer 16

Generalizing with names for things. This is done through chaining rather than logic. A three year old may call any furry thing a doggy.

Question 17

What is telegraphic speech?

Answer 17

Speech without the articles or extras, such as how they would appear in a telegram. “Me go.”

Question 18

What is holographic speech?

Answer 18

When a young child uses one word (holophrases) to convey a whole sentence. “Me” for “give that to me.”

Question 19

What is the gender difference for language learning

Answer 19

Girls are faster and more accurate than boys.

Question 20

Are bilingual children faster or slower at language learning?

Answer 20

They are slower.

Question 21

What is processed in the same regions of the brain as producing and understanding speech?

Answer 21

Reading and writing, although there are slight differences.

Question 22

What do children usually use first, nouns or verbs?

Answer 22

Nouns first, then verbs. “Me want” or “Mommy shirt.”

Question 23

What are the lanuage acquisition milestones at 1, 2, 3, and 4 years?

Answer 23

1 year: first spoken word(s)
2 years: >50 spoken words, usually in two- (and then three-) word phrases
3 years: 1,000-word vocabulary, but use has many grammatical errors
4 years: grammar problems are random exceptions.

Question 24

What is the Whorfian hypothesis?

Answer 24

Language or how a culture says things influences that culture’s perspective. It has been found, however, that cultures that don’t have words for certain colors can still recognize them, so it is unclear to what extent language really affects our perceptions.

Question 25

What did Roger Brown research?

Answer 25

Studied the areas of socials, developmental, and linguistic psychology and found that children’s understanding of grammatical rules develops as they make hypotheses about how syntax words and then self-correct with experience.

Question 26

What is active speech?

Answer 26

Katherine Nelson found that language really begins to develop with the onset of active speech rather than during the first year of only listening.

Question 27

What did William Labov study?

Answer 27

Ebonics and found it had its own complex internal structure.

Question 28

What did Vygotsky and Luria find?

Answer 28

They studied the development of word meanings and found them to be complex and altered by interpersonal experience. They also stated that language is a tool (and not just a byproduct) in the development of abstract thinking.

Question 29

What are semantic differential charts?

Answer 29

Founded by Osgood, these allow people to plot the meanings of words on graphs. People with similar backgrounds and interests plotted words similarly. Words have similar connotations (implied meaning) for cultures or subcultures.