Exam #2

You must answer each of the first five questions and you may choose any one of the final three questions as your sixth question to answer.

Please begin each answer on a new page of the blue book. There are additional blue books, so don't worry about length. You should budget about 10 minutes for each answer. Be sure your answers are concise and complete. All claims and positions should be justified.

Please put your name on the front of each blue book you use!

1. The word "dog" is recognized faster than the word "distance" at the end of a sentence beginning with, "The boy walked the ..." Contrast the explanations for this effect that would be provided by the cohort model and the TRACE model.

2. Your neighbor has a third-grade child who has had a great deal of difficulty learning to read. Your neighbor sees an infomercial that advertises special glasses, which the advertiser claims gives correction for the visual processing problems of most dyslexics. What would you tell your neighbor? What evidence is there to support your position?

3. Draw a diagram that represents the general stages of processing the sentence, "My teacher is a lighthouse to students." How does the information flow among the stages differ for modular and interactive views?

4. Outline the mental processes that allow you to have a conversation with someone else. Of the processes you mentioned, which are the most demanding of you working memory resources? Justify your conclusions about working memory demands.

5. Describe the gavagai problem and its connection to the problem of explaining lexical development. In what sense is the problem compounded by the lack of negative evidence in language acquisition?

6. Answer any one of the following three questions:
   1. A writing system has to cope with several demands. To make life easier for learners, the spelling of a word should be largely based on how it sounds. But spelling also shouldn't be affected by regional pronounciation differences; someone raised in Boston should spell "yard" the same as someone raised in Fresno. A writing system should distinguish homophones, such as "break" and "brake," and also capture some of the logic of word meaning, so that "write" and "writing" should start with the same string of letters. Existing writing systems, such as Chinese logograms, English spelling, and Japanese kana, are kinds of attempts to satisfy these demands. If one was to try to improve on English spelling, where would one start?

   2. Give an example of a speech error that you would regard as a mixed error. Trace through the mental processes that produced the utterance from the message level to articulation. Is your explanation based on a modular or an interactive view?

   3. Compare and contrast prosodic bootstrapping, syntactic bootstrapping, and semantic bootstrapping. Could all of these be used by the same child during language acquisition? Explain.