Spring, 2001 Psy 310-810 Exam #2 Questions

Exam #2 Questions

Explain why it is easier to get an automated speech recognition system to perform well if it only has to recognize words spoken by a particular individual. Next, imagine that you wanted to improve the performance of an automated system by having it make use of top-down processing in word recognition. What kinds of information would you have to build into the system's memory?
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.
A la "Laddle Rat Rotten Hut," create a sentence where the sounds of the words have an auditory pattern of a different set of words. For example, "I scream!" could be "Eyes cream!" or "Ice cream!"
How might the orthographic depth of a writing system be related to the issue of the sublexical units involved in word recognition? For example, would preserving morphological relations in the orthography at the expense of some spelling-to-sound regularity influence which sublexical units are functional? How could you test this empirically?
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?
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?
Describe the strongest evidence in favor of the idea that lexical access is autonomous. What evidence provides the strongest support for the autonomy of syntactic parsing? Can the data you have discussed be handled by ineractive approaches to lexical and syntactic processing?
Discuss how figurative processing permeates language at the lexical, sentence, and passage levels.
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?
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?
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.
A key concept in perception of language is the iterative use of partial knowledge in organizing larger and larger speech segments, that percepts result from an interaction of previous knowledge with current knowledge or stimulation. Discuss this tpe of model in connection with the perception of speech. Be sure to incorporate examples that support your thesis.
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?
Compare and contrast parameter-setting and processing-load explanations for the tendency to omit subjects in telegraphic speech.
Compare and contrast prosodic bootstrapping, syntactic bootstrapping, and semantic bootstrapping. Could all of these be used by the same child during language acquisition? Explain.
Contrast explanations for overregularization that have innate components (like Pinker) versus those without innate components (like connectionist approaches).
Describe how the HAS procedure has been used to show that infants lose the ability to distinguish among some sounds that they were able to discriminate shortly after birth.
As children move from holophrases to telegraphic speech, to what extent is their vocabulary size also increasing? How might changes in syntactic ability be related to both increases in the mean length of utterance and the size of a child's vocabulary?
What regularities in language acquisition can you identify? Since language acquisition can be investigated at a number of different levels, be sure to consider regularities at all levels. Are regularities at any one level of use in learning about language at another level? How?