Ling 425/709
Study Questions
The Language Sample
1. Give three reasons for collecting a spontaneous language sample.
2. What are two weaknesses of the spontaneous language sample method?
3. What is a strength of the parental diary method?
4. What is a weakness of the parental diary method?
5. What is a strength of the experimental approach?
6. What is a weakness of the experimental approach?
7. What are some examples of contextual features which the observer should record?
8. Discuss how specific kinds of materials affect the language obtained from the child.
9. Give a general schedule for a language sampling session.
10. What are some suggestions on how to begin a session?
11. Define and give examples of equivalent and nonequivalent relations between sentences and utterances.
Description and Explanation
1. What are the three major historical periods in the study of first language acquisition, and their dates?
2. Was the major goal of diary studies descriptive or explanatory? Explain.
3. Give two reasons why the diary studies are of value to present day investigators.
4. What are two criticisms of diary studies?
5. What three major areas were studied in large sample studies?
6. Give two major weaknesses of the large sample studies and explain why these weaknesses are
not sufficient to reject these studies outright.
7. Point out the major innovations in longitudinal language samples from the two earlier methods used.
8. What does Brainerd (1978) require to separate explanation from description?
9. Describe the basic differences between the Child Language and Language Acquisition perspectives.
10. What is negative evidence?
11. What is the difference between direct and indirect forms of negative evidence?
12. Give three arguments against the claim that children acquire grammar through direct negative evidence.
13. Define the Competence Assumption and provide an example of its use. Is it sufficient to conclude that a child’s utterance is produced by a rule of grammar? Explain.
14. Define the Productivity Assumption and provide an example of its use.
15. What is the Strong Inclusion Hypothesis?
16. What is the Weak Inclusion Hypothesis?
17. What is an argument in favor of taking a Constructionist view rather than either one of the Maturationists’ views?
18. What are three advantages of parameters versus rules?
19. What argument does Newmeyer make against the idea that parameters define clusters of morphosyntactic properties?
20. What arguments does Newmeyer use to show that parameters are not easier to acquire than rules?
21. What is “the poverty of the stimulus argument”?
22. How does the poverty of the stimulus argument support Universal Grammar?
23. Give an example of a poverty of the stimulus argument.
24. What five points do Pullum & Scholz require for a poverty of the stimulus argument to be true?
25. What problem do Pullum & Scholz raise for Gordon and Pinker’s analysis of noun compounds?
26. What problem do Pullum & Scholz raise for Chomsky’s analysis of yes/no question formation?
27. What problem does the core/periphery distinction raise for poverty of the stimulus arguments?
The Period of Single Word Utterances
1. Describe the general results on the early production of words in Buhler (1931) and Smith (1926).
2. What are Benedict’s two general findings on the acquisition of words in comprehension?
3. What is the evidence in Benedict that rate of acquisition and the gap between comprehension and production are independent of each other?
4. How do Expressive and Referential children, based on Nelson (1973), differ in the semantic categories of their vocabulary?
5. Cite Benedict’s findings on the differences in semantic categories for comprehension and production. What is the explanation given in class for this difference?
6. What is Gentner’s Natural Partitions Hypothesis?
7. What other explanations did Gentner test for the preponderance of nouns?
8. Describe the problem that type versus token frequency creates for Gentner’s hypothesis.
9. Define “underextension” and describe its relevance to understanding early vocabulary development.
10. Define “overextension” and give Braunwald’s example of her daughter’s use of “cookie”.
11. Give Rescorla’s findings on the frequency of overextensions.
12. Define Rescorla’s three kinds of overextensions, and give their frequency of occurrence.
13. What is an “associative complex”? Provide an example.
14. Describe the method used by Thomson and Chapman (1977) to study overextensions in comprehension and production. What were their results?
15. Describe how each of the following factors may underlie overextension:
a. semantic development
b. limited vocabulary
c. retrieval problems
d. phonological factors
Infant Speech Perception
1. What are the boundaries of the Period of Prelinguistic Development?
2. Contrast the onset of child speech perception and child speech production in relation to the end of the Period of Prelinguistic Development.
3. Briefly describe four possible theories of infant speech perception.
4. Describe how each of these theories differ concerning the effects of linguistic experience on the infant’s speech perception ability.
5. Briefly describe the three major methods used to test infant speech perception.
6. Describe what is meant by categorical perception.
7. Discuss the stimuli and test conditions used by Eimas et al. (1971). What were the results?
8. Contrast the stimulus items used and method of scoring used by Eilers et al. (1978) with that used by Eimas et al. (1971).
9. Summarize three controversies that characterize the research on infant speech perception.
10. Describe Werker & Tees (1984) results on the perception of non-native sounds.
11. When does infant speech production begin? Why?
12. What are the four primary differences between the adult’s and the infant’s vocal tract?
14. Outline the major characteristics of Oller’s five stages of infant vocalizations.
15. Discuss three possible causes for the stages found by Oller. Include Oller’s objections to a totally biological explanation.
Phonological Development
1. Describe the difference between phonetic discrimination and phonemic contrast.
2. What feature makes Jakobson’s theory of phonological development explanatory? Explain.
3. What data does Jakobson use to predict an invariant order of phonological development?
4. What role does Jakobson give to individual variation in his theory?
5. What evidence does Jakobson provide to demonstrate the effect of a child’s phonology on her speech?
6. Why would Jakobson predict the sounds babbled by infants would be unrelated to their phonological development?
7. What are Jakobson’s Laws of Irreversible Solidarity?
8. Describe Jakobson’s Principle of Maximal Contrast.
9. What early phonemic contrasts does Jakobson predict?
10. Why is Jakobson’s theory difficult to test?
11. Describe the clinical method Svachkin (1948) used in his study of phonological development.
12. How do Svachkin’s findings support Jakobson’s predictions?
13. How do Svachkin’s findings contradict Jakobson’s predictions?
14. How does Braine’s study support a level of phonological organization in children’s speech?
15. What are two way in which the Phone Class method exaggerates individual variation?
16. How does the Phonetic Inventory method minimize individual variation?
17. Briefly outline the three steps to the Phonetic Inventories and Phonological Contrast approach.
18. What are six characteristics of the Lexical Parameter in children’s phonological development?
19. How does phonological development in K’iche’ contrast with that in English?
20. What is meant by the term “functional load”?
21. What do the results of the Pye, Mateo, Pfeiler, Lopez & Gutierrez (2006) study add to the earlier study of K’iche’?
Semantic Development
1. What are the two main levels of meaning?
2. What four general issues influence the study of meaning?
3. What are six problems for a semantic theory that relies on semantic features?
4. What are four problems for prototype theories of meaning?
5. Why does Clark’s (1973) Semantic Feature Hypothesis predict early overextensions?
6. Why does Nelson’s (1974) Functional Core Concept Theory predict early underextensions?
7. What are two problems that affect both theories?
8. How did Anglin (1977) operationally define a word’s semantic extension?
9. How did Anglin operationally define a word’s semantic intension?
10. What is Anglin’s hypothesis about children’s initial word meanings?
11. Do Anglin’s results support Brown’s hypothesis that children begin with word meanings at an intermediate level?
12. What are two difficulties in assigning children’s word meanings to an intermediate level?
13. What three factors did Anglin report govern the development of word meaning?
14. Describe the materials Anglin used to test children’s semantic extensions.
15. What did Anglin discover about children’s underextensions and overextensions?
16. How did the experimental materials Anglin used affect his results on semantic extensions?
17. What part did individual variation play in Anglin’s results?
18. What did Anglin conclude about children’s knowledge of semantic intension?
19. What did Bowerman discover about children’s semantic extensions for verbs?
20. Does semantic extension on the basis of subjective experience support the Semantic Feature Hypothesis? Explain.
21. Does semantic extension on the basis of subjective experience support the Functional Core Concept Theory? Explain.
22. Describe an example of individual variation in Bowerman’s findings.
23. What evidence suggests that Eva has acquire the adult meaning for the word ‘kick’?
24. How does Eva’s use of the word ‘kick’ differ from that of an adult speaker?
25. How could Eva use positive evidence to acquire the adult meaning of ‘kick’?
26. What is Quine’s problem?
27. Why are innate constraints on word meaning important is solving Quine’s problem?
28. What is the Whole Object Bias?
29. What is the Taxonomic Bias?
30. What is the Mutual Exclusivity Bias?
31. What is a problem in extending the whole object bias to verbs?
32. How did Soja, Carey & Spelke (1991) test children’s ontological categories?
33. How did their results show that children distinguish between objects and substances?
34. What are two limitations to their study?
35. How do Imai & Gentner (1997) address the limitations in Soja, Carey & Spelke’s study?
36. Do Japanese and American subjects make the same distinctions between objects and substances?
37. How did Landau, Leyton, Lynch & Moore (1992) demonstrate the effect of object theory on children’s attention to object shape?
38. What did Choi & Bowerman (1991) demonstrate about the onset of cross-linguistic differences in word meaning?
39. What do Brown’s (2001) observations add about our knowledge of cross-linguistic semantic differences?
40. What did Pye, Loeb & Pao (1996) demonstrate about the cross-linguistic development of verb meaning?