Answer the following questions in the space provided.

1. At what age do infants prefer to listen to stories with pauses at clause boundaries, phrase boundaries and word boundaries?

7 months for clause boundaries
9 months for phrase boundaries
11 months for word boundaries

2. In an attempt to test the emergence of syntax in children, researchers designed an experiment were children listened to passages that were identical except for the placement of certain function words. In the natural passages, each function word occurred in its proper sentential position. In the unnatural passages, the function words were misplaced by interchanging them with function words from another sentential position. What were the results of this study and what do they suggest?

16-month olds, showed a significant listening preference for the natural passages. In English you can say “He is coming”, “He can come”, but not “He can coming”. So after exploring these co-occurrence relations, they found that 18-month-olds, but not 15-months olds, preferred passages that contained the well-formed dependency over ones with an ungrammatical combination. HOWEVER, this depended on the number of syllables in between the is and the –ing. In different versions, they added adverbial relationships of different lengths. When a two-syllable adverbial was present, 18-month-olds continued to listen significantly longer to the natural than to the unnatural passages. HOWEVER, when longer adverbial of 3 or 4 syllables were used, the listening preferences for the natural versions disappeared.

When the intervening words became too long, the 18-month olds ceased to show a preference. This suggests that the 18-month olds are working with a limited processing window (a limited working memory), and that they are only picking up relevant dependencies that fall within this window.

3. Define the point made by Quine when he talked about an indeterminacy of reference as it relates to language acquisition.

Quine argued that word-to-word mapping is underdetermined. The data provided for learning language is not sufficient to determine the true meanings of words.

4. It was noticed that children in their attempt to learn new words and use them in their every day interactions, they overextended some words (e.g. by calling a different animals dogs). However, some important observations were made about the use of overextensions by children that might suggest two different things. Identify the observations made and what they suggest.

Rescorla (1980) found that although 1/3 of word uses were overextensions, this was really a small number of vocabulary items that were overextended repeatedly. And overextensions are even less common in comprehension tasks – and when they do occur, they don’t seem to relate to overextensions in production. This might help us to understand what kids are doing when they over extend rather than give us an inside to their word representations.

• Overextensions could be a communicative strategy by children when they don’t know the word for something.
• performance limitations(tendency to produce a higher-frequency word when the child fails to access a low-frequency word like cow).

5. Children show different biases in their word learning. One of these biases is taxonomic assumption. Define it and explain how it’s different from thematic relations.

Once children decide a term refers to the whole object, they have to figure out how to extend it to other objects. They need to put this new object in a category with similar objects. Therefore, if a child learned the new word cat, they would put in the same category as dog since they are both animals. A thematic relation would occur, when the child was presented with two objects such as a cat and a dog, and a thematically related object such as cat food, the child will select the cat and the cat food as being part of the same category.

6. Explain what the shape bias refers to and indicate when and at what age children generalize novel names to other objects on the basis of shape.

When the exemplar object is made of solid, rigid material, children 24-months of age and older generalize novel names to other objects on the basis of shape (shape bias). However, when the exemplar object is made from a nonsolid substance such as hair gel or face cream, children generalize the novel name to test objects made from the same material (material bias).

Answer the following multiple choice questions:

1. b

2. c

3. c