Language Practice MCQ

Two-year-old Jia tells her grandmother that she “sweeped” the floor yesterday. The scenario illustrates that children

• cannot learn grammatical rules during the first two years of life

• learn language primarily through operant conditioning

• will model only words used by adults in their environment

• overgeneralize the use of grammatical rules

• are not born with an innate language acquisition device

A 40-year-old man and his 7-year-old son move to a country where they have to learn a new language. Compared with his son, the 40-year-old man will

• have more difficulty learning to produce phonemes that do not exist in his native language

• require less active processing to acquire the syntax of the new language

• overregularize more often

• learn the grammar of the new language more slowly but ultimately acquire the language better

• learn new vocabulary at a faster rate by using techniques such as fast mapping

According to Noam Chomsky, understanding a sentence involves which of the following transformations between structures?

• Perceptual to functional

• Symbolic to analytic

• Simple to complex

• Surface to deep

• Pragmatic to syntactic

Genie was a girl who endured abusive and neglectful conditions and was deprived of language exposure until she was rescued at age 13. Despite remediation, Genie was unable to learn to speak fluently. Historically, this case study was used to demonstrate the effects of

• temperament

• critical periods

• linguistic determinism

• self-fulfilling prophecies

• cognitive dissonance

The utterance “likes dog my swim to” does not sound correct because it violates the rules of

• lexicon

• prosody

• syntax

• universal grammar

• fast mapping

When the word “walk” is changed to “walked,” the suffix “ed” is an example of a

• morpheme

• phoneme

• syntax

• lexicon

• holographic speech

Which of the following statements is most consistent with Benjamin Whorf’s concept of linguistic determinism?

• The languages of nearly all cultures contain the same basic sounds and root meanings.

• Language shapes the way an individual thinks and interprets experiences.

• The human nervous system is predisposed to the acquisition and use of language.

• If an individual is not exposed to language during a critical period, language acquisition will be impaired.

• The development of cognitive schemas precedes language development.

According to Benjamin Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis, which of the following is true?

• Individuals have a natural predisposition to learn language.

• Individuals learn positive instances of concepts faster than they learn negative instances.

• Children learn their first language from their relatives and their peer group.

• Different languages predispose those individuals who speak them to think about the world in different ways.

• Children learn quantifying words such as "more" and "further" sooner than they do absolutes such as "every" and "all."

Yun was learning English as an adult. She found that she had trouble with some of the sounds in English because those sounds were not part of her native Chinese. The difficulty she was having involved

• morphemes

• phonemes

• semantics

• syntax

• universal grammar

Which of the following is an example of a prelinguistic event?

• Telegraphic speech

• Holographic speech

• Babbling

• Overextension

• Underextension