Exam #3 Questions

1. Outline the most important evidence for the existence of one or more critical periods in language acquisition. Next, contrast two different interpretations of this evidence. Is it possible to explain the data without appealing to a nativist view of language acquisition?
2. Compare the situations faced by a child reared in an environment in which a pidgin is the dominant langauge with the situation faced by a deaf child born to parents who know no sign language. Does either of these situations provide convincing evidence in support of a nativist view of language acquisition? Explain.
3. Explain the concept of a double dissociation. What evidence have you learned about that that represents the strongest case for a double dissociation between language and more general cognitive abilities? Justify your answer.
4. Studies of children with specific language impairment, Williams syndrome and Down syndrome, have been interpreted as showing a dissociation between language and cognition. What are the problems with such a strong interpretation of these data? Give an example of how a more fine grained analysis of the abilities have weakened the support for a strongly nativist view.
5. The article Baby Emma isn't talking yet, but she's still saying plenty by Robin Rhodes-Crowll (Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 2001) provides an introduction to an area of research that makes the following claims (among other claims, see http://www.sign2me.com/about2.htm for other claims):
   1. Since all people, babies included, learn through repetition, signing serves as a powerful educational tool. Parents who sign with their babies tend to repeat words, both verbally and with signs, more than parents who only speak to their babies. Where a non-signing parent might just ask their baby, "Do you want more?" a signing parent might sign "more" several times while verbally asking, "Do you want more? More? Okay, I'll give you more." So signing babies tend to get more exposure to each word being emphasized with a sign. Moreover, each of those words is reinforced by the multiple modalities in which it is conveyed to and from the child: audibly, visually, and kinesthetically.
   2. During his [Dr. Joseph Garcia] research, he discovered that hearing children began replicating signs as early as eight months, with some exceptional children as early as six months. This new discovery seriously challenged the opinion of many child development experts, including Piaget who theorized that babies can't mentally represent symbols until they are almost two, and therefore can't learn to talk until then.
   3. Joseph also found that once the signing children began speaking, they tended to have a better grasp of grammar and syntax, past and present tenses, and of language in general.
   4. One might think that if an emphasis is placed on manual communication, verbal communication will be delayed. In fact, the reverse seems to be true. When this issue was reviewed in Acredolo and Goodwyn's study, it was discovered that not only do signing children tend to learn to speak sooner, but by age two they have a vocabulary of 50 more real words, on average, than their non-signing counterparts.
   5. By age three, children exposed to signing had language skills approaching that expected of four year olds. In the same way that crawling seems to stimulate a child's interest in walking, signing seems to provide an excellent bridge to verbal communication.
   Choose one of these five claims and either agree or disagree with the claim, justifying your answer on the basis of what you know of language acquisition.
6. For which language function(s) is the evidence strongest for neural localization in a rather restricted area? Describe a function that is not strictly localized. Describe evidence that supports your answer.
7. What insights have the study of native signers provided on the nature of the functions of various neurological structures in the classical model?
8. Discuss the distinction between the terms "related" and "exclusively related" as applied to the study of brain-language relationships. How are these terms related to the idea of modularity? Why are both activation studies and lesion studies needed to determine whether some function is related to a particular brain area?
9. Draw a sketch of the left hemisphere and label the areas comprising the classic language circuit. Describe the classical theory's approach to the function of these areas and the relationships between these areas.
10. In what important ways are animals and humans similar in the acquisition of language and in what distinctive ways are they different?
11. Return to Hockett's Features. After what you've learned during the course of this semester, what single feature do you believe to be the most important characteristic of language? Justify your answer.

Being a benevolent peoples, the islanders took the two sailors into their community and adopted them. In gratitude for this hospitality, the two sailors set up a school, and with the material from the footlocker, began teaching the islanders how to read and write (English, of course, since the islanders had no written component to their language). The footlocker contained many things, chief amongst them in importance being a Bible, a medical manual, the collected works of William Shakespeare and an illustrated reading primer. The sailors lived for many years and were dearly loved by the islanders.

When the sailors died (oddly, within moments of each other), the islanders gathered to discuss how best to honor these two. They were revered (almost as gods - having survived a ferocious storm and having brought knowledge, health and religion), and it was decided amongst the natives that each child born from that day on should be brought up to be as much like Allan and Ian as possible. They were instructed in medicines, in the mysteries of religion and in the language of the Author.

This island was, as I said earlier, recently discovered. The material I have described comes from the writings of a noted anthropologist, Dr. A. Bardolator. Dr. Bardolator has also reported a few other discoveries.

Take their art, for example. All of their works of art can be categorized in one of twenty-six ways. There is the Apple art, the Baby art, the Cat art, up to the Zebra art. Each work of art is labeled with a word from one of the Author's works. No picture ever appears without it's word. It is pretty representational... The reason for this, you see, is that the islanders believe that words were only names for things, and words came in twenty-six varieties. In fact, Allan and Ian tried to talk the islanders out of carrying things with them, for the islanders thought that they could merely "...carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they were going to discourse on," but they never succeeded.

Each home has its Noam. You see, Allan and Ian's parrot (you recall I mentioned a parrot) was named Noam. Noam talked frequently, saying such things as "Ahoy, there!" and "Squawk!" and "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously!" Noam wasn't easy to please (although he was eager to please), found no crackers to his liking, and died within a year of arriving on Sinistralia. Allan and Ian had him stuffed, and always talked to him. The islanders were so impressed with the respect that the sailors showed Noam, that they searched high and low for another parrot. The best that they could do, however, was to find a flock of flamingos. So they brought the flamingos to the village, and every home tried to teach their "Noam" to speak. The best that anyone was able to do, though, was to have their Noam say "Squawk!" This success was enough to keep the members of each household convinced that their Noam could one day speak. To this day each household tries to get their Noam to say "Ahoy, there!" (and there is this rumor about a goldfish that understands what the flamingos are saying...)

Now, Dr. Bardolator is interested in writing a book about the Sinistralians, and has asked for your help. He wants to know your opinion on these topics.

12. He would like to know a little bit more about the artwork. He is particularly interested in the labeling given each work of art, and the insistence of the Sinistralians on basing all meaning on "things." What are your thoughts? And what arguments could Allan and Ian have used to try to dissuade the Islanders from their reliance on "things?"
13. Will any household get their Noam to say, "Ahoy, there?" Why or why not?

You may recall that after Allan and Ian died, the islanders decided to honor the two sailors. I didn't go into detail then, but...they decided that each child born from that day on should be brought up to be as much like Allen and Ian as possible.

This wasn't an easy decision, since Allan had no right arm and Ian had no right ear. The islanders were, you remember, benevolent, and so they decreed that the children would have their right arm bound to their body and their right ear covered and wrapped (in lieu of other, more drastic, solutions).

The children were also to be instructed in the language of the Author. And these children, and their children, and so on down to the present day have followed this tradition. However, a small group preserved the original culture and language. Each member of this group secretly taught their children the original language, and how it was on the island before the sailors came. And although no one realizes it, everyone to this day teaches their children these things in secret. The language of the Author is the language of the island and the mother tongue is spoken within each household, only within the family.

14. Dr. Bardolator wants to know what neurological effects there might have been as a result of being forced to be left-handed and left-eared (the island was originally called Dextralia, but the name changed after the sailors died).
15. He would also like to know a little about the changes (cognitive or otherwise) that occurred as a result of the bilingual education they have received since the deaths of the sailors. He is interested in your speculations on these and other matters which you feel may be pertinent to his book on the Sinistralians.

1. Language is both symbolic and rule-governed. Which of Hockett's features support language as symbolic and which support language as rule-governed?
2. If the modularity view is correct, what aspects of language are most likely to be specialized modules that operate without using general memory abilities? What aspects of language are most likely to depend more strongly on general cognitive abilities? (Justify, justify, justify!!)
3. Is it possible to point to any particular word and identify it as the longest word in the English language? Explain.
4. Using the diagrammed sentence above ("George stayed after school with the teacher."), compare and contrast how the meaning of the sentence would be explained in conceptual semantics and in cognitive grammar. Which one of the two views of meaning maintains the stronger distinction between syntax and semantics?
5. Test your understanding of relative clause formation by determining the main and subordinate sentences in the Ambiguity Example sentence 1b.
6. Let's say that you replicated Neely's 1977 experiment on semantic priming of lexical decisions, except that you had a group of people who had brain damage that affected their ability to perform a controlled shift of attention. Describe what aspects of the data would be the same as Neely's and what aspects would differ.
7. Explain the limitations of left-branching, right-branching and center-embedded sentence structures under Baddeley's Model of Working Memory. What predictions can you make under this model of the sentence structures of relatively long utterances and the ease of comprehension (or production)?
8. What data indicate that the spread of activation in a semantic network is an automatic process?
9. Point to some examples of cultural influences on language. Are these examples of linguistic determinism or linguistic relativism?
10. 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?
11. 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!"
12. 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?
13. Discuss how figurative processing permeates language at the lexical, sentence, and passage levels.
14. 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.
15. Compare and contrast parameter-setting and processing-load explanations for the tendency to omit subjects in telegraphic speech.
16. Contrast explanations for overregularization that have innate components (like Pinker) versus those without innate components (like connectionist approaches).
17. 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.
18. 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?
19. 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?