Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the Submit my answers button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:

Symbols used to indicate the correct pronunciation of letters in particular words are referred to as ______.
a) diacritical marks
b) phonological indicators
c) grammatical transformations
d) surface structures

Question 2:

Why is speech only a small subset of language?
a) It is open-ended.
b) It describes only the sentences that are actually spoken.
c) It does not require the use of grammar.
d) It consists of all possible sentences.

Question 3:

Which of the following terms is used to describe the rules that define the way symbols can be rewritten as other symbols?
a) Grammar
b) Phase structure
c) Semantic
d) Phonological

Question 4:

According to Chomsky, humans have a largely innate language structure. What is this called?
a) The parameter-setting hypothesis
b) Mirror neurons
c) The universal grammar
d) The code model of communication

Question 5:

When we understand a sentence, we transform a surface structure into ______.
a) a deep structure
b) an underlying structure
c) syntax
d) grammatical structure

Question 6:

The belief that the speech that a child is exposed to is not enough for a child to abstract the structure of language is evidence for ______.
a) Skinner’s notion that children learn via feedback from parents and others
b) the innateness hypothesis
c) the notion that the environment has no influence on language acquisition
d) the “poverty of the stimulus” argument

Question 7:

The acquisition of a particular language involves ______.
a) minimalism
b) parameter setting
c) language acquisition device
d) deep structure

Question 8:

“The small animal that lived on the farm that was important for grain that was used to feed the town’s people who had emigrated from a small town in Wales where the mining industry… etc.” is a sentence that embeds sentences within sentences. It is called ______.
a) parental reformulations
b) concealing
c) recursion
d) minimalism

Question 9:

Chomsky et al. suggest that the faculty of language contains three parts. Which of the following is NOT one of them?
a) Computational system
b) Sensory-motor system
c) Conceptual-intentional system
d) Uniquely human system

Question 10:

Which of the following terms describes neurons that fire not only when performing an action, but also when viewing the same action?
a) Copy-cat
b) Mirror
c) Reflective
d) Dual-code

Question 11:

Producing the sounds of a language is known as ______.
a) phonemes
b) morphemes
c) articulation
d) syntax

Question 12:

The smallest unit in a language is ______.
a) a phoneme
b) a morpheme
c) a sentence
d) a word

Question 13:

The approximate number of phonemes in the English language is ______, whereas Spanish has ______ phonemes.
a) 24; 44
b) 24; 20
c) 44; 24
d) 20; 24

Question 14:

What, according to Chomsky, is the problem with finite state grammars?
a) They contain phrase structure rules.
b) They are open to grammatical transformations.
c) They generate only sentences that move from right to left.
d) They can’t generate all the grammatical utterances of a natural language.

Question 15:

Brown and Hanlon (1970) provided evidence that supported ______.
a) the innateness hypothesis
b) minimalism
c) the parameter-setting hypothesis
d) the idea that children receive corrective feedback on ungrammatical utterances

Question 16:

What did Huttenlocher et al. (2002) note in studying syntactic development in children?
a) Syntactic development was primarily influenced by the complexity of parental speech.
b) Syntactic development was influenced by the complexity of teacher speech.
c) The complexity of parental and teacher speech equally influenced syntactic development.
d) The complexity of neither parental nor teacher speech influenced syntactic development.

Question 17:

Which of the following is NOT one of Grices’s conversational maxims?
a) Maxim of quality
b) Maxim of quantity
c) Maxim of relativity
d) Maxim of manner

Question 18:

What is the condition that results in the inability to read letter by letter is called?
a) Surface dyslexia
b) Phonological dyslexia
c) Directional dyslexia
d) Visual dyslexia

Question 19:

In the sentence “I went to watch the crane” the word “crane” is an example of ______.
a) a polysemous word
b) a pretense
c) a given-new contract
d) a concealing function

Question 20:

Which of the following is NOT one of the three pairs of antagonistic colours in Hering’s opponent process theory?
a) White–black
b) Yellow–blue
c) Blue–green
d) Red–green

True or False Questions

Question 21:

A grammatical utterance must be semantically correct and meaningful.
a) True
b) False

Question 22:

Exposing children to complex speech can be beneficial.
a) True
b) False

Question 23:

More recent accounts of language acquisition focus even more deeply on innate capabilities and less on the possibility of learning.
a) True
b) False

Question 24:

Someone who goes on and on about a needless point is probably violating the maxim of quantity.
a) True
b) False

Question 25:

One reason that humanities teachers have more hesitation pauses than science teachers could be due to words in the humanities having more synonyms than words in the sciences.
a) True
b) False

Question 26:

All morphemes are words.
a) True
b) False

Question 27:

Infants have the capacity to learn the phonemes from all languages.
a) True
b) False

Question 28:

Metaphor and irony are examples of figurative speech.
a) True
b) False

Question 29:

Exposure to printed materials is related to the cognitive skills of verbal fluency and vocabulary.
a) True
b) False

Question 30:

When we produce a sentence, we proceed from surface structure to deep structure.
a) True
b) False

Higher Education

Cognition, Sixth Edition: Chapter 09