Midterm Review Session

1. Midterm Review Session Psy1302

2. Game Time • Divide into two teams! • Winning team gets bragging rights.

3. Rules for the two teams • Each round, the team rotates a person to be in the hot seat. That person will answer the question for the team. • Which team goes first is determined by stone-paper-scissors on the first round (and then alternates). • The person in the hot seat may consult team members and text before responding. • Each team has 3 options for bailing out of answering questions that stump them. Once an option is used, it cannot be used for other questions. The options are: • Skip the question and answer the next one. • Let another team member respond. • Let the other team answer, and win a point if the other team is wrong. • For essay questions, any team member can supplement their team members’ response after the round. • Each round, the team that answers correctly gets 1 point.

4. Question 1 • ____________ pathways enable each half of the brain to control the opposite side of the body. • Ipsilateral • Contralateral • Dichotic • Dissociation

5. Question 2 • In split brain patients, the corpus callosum was surgically severed: • to study how each hemisphere operates independently • to relieve severe depression • to control severe epilepsy • to control Parkinson’s disease

6. Question 3 • The system of communication used by vervet monkeys: • is generally considered equivalent in complexity to human language • includes separate calls to signal the presence of different kinds of predators • displays displacement and duality of patterning, two hallmarks of human language • is taken as evidence that the vervets possess a theory of mind

7. Question 4 • Information from the _______ is sent first to the right hemisphere. • right visual field • left retina • right half of each retina • corpus callosum

8. Question 5 • Genie’s language acquisition was particularly weak in the area of: • semantics • pragmatics • syntax • phonology

9. Question 6 • Johnson and Newport (1989) studied native Korean and Chinese speakers who had immigrated to the United States. The study showed that those who arrived in the US between _____ years old had the highest grammatical scores. • 3 and 7 • 8 and 10 • 11 and 15 • 16 and 39

10. Question 7 • The motor theory of speech perception: • contends that we perceive speech by reference to production • states that perception and production operate independently • is inconsistent with the notion of a phonetic module • focuses on speech dysfluency

11. Question 8 • McGurk and MacDonald (1976) found that when a speaker’s lips produce the syllable /ga/ while an audio tape of the sound /ba/ is played, listeners hear the fused sound as: • /ga/ • /ba/ • /da/ • a nonspeech chirp

12. Question 9 • The production of vowels is characterized by: • whether they are voiced or unvoiced • the location of constriction in the vocal tract • the position and height of the tongue • the degree of frication

13. Question 10 • In a study on categorical perception, listeners hear two sounds and then a third, and determine if the third sound was the same as the first or the second. Results show that: • performance is at chance if the two sounds are from the same phonetic category • performance is poor at the outset but listeners improve significantly with practice • performance is better if the two sounds are from the same phonetic category than if they are from different phonetic categories • all of the above

14. Question 11 • Following Zwitserlood (1989), please draw the pattern of activation most consistent with context influencing generation of candidates: (complete the graph below) Target Word - solid line Competitor - dashed line high activation Levels of Activation 0 activation Onset of word Recognition Point Time 

15. Question 12 • In a study, experimenters took the word “tape” and varied the /t/’s transitional formants to create stimuli ranging from “tape” to “cape.” They found that identification of the first consonant as a /t/ or a /k/ for the ambiguous stimuli was influenced by the preceding consonant. For example, if a word ending in “sh” (e.g., “foolish”) precedes the ambiguous stimuli, the consonant is more likely to be perceived as a /t/ in “tape.” If the word ending in “s” (e.g., “Christmas”) precedes the ambiguous stimuli, the consonant is more likely to be perceived as a /k/ in “cape.” What is this phenomenon called? Fill out the graph below.

16. Question 13 • For semantically opaque compound words such as “butterfly”, do we retrieve the meaning of “butterfly” in addition to the meanings of its component words “butter” and “fly”? • Design an experiment to test this hypothesis. • (Other team gets to decide whether your experiment is sound. You do not score a point if they can find major flaws)

17. Question 14 • Lexical neighbors are words that sound similar to a target item. Often, they are defined as words that differ by one phoneme (e.g. for cat: at, scat, pat, cut, and cap). Some lexical neighborhoods are denser than others (-at ending words are more prevalent than –up ending words). • Would you be faster or slower at recognizing words with dense lexical neighbors or sparse lexical neighbors? Why do you think that? • How might you design an experiment to test this?

18. Question 15 • Please explain the following cartoon

19. Classmate Question 16 • Scientists recently came upon a new species of mammal which they call grickets. These grickets communicate with each other very frequently. Grickets only make about fifty sounds altogether, but scientists estimate that they combine these sounds into about ten thousand words, which they use to discuss their upcoming meals, their games, the weather, etc (always practical, truthful conversations.) They do not seem to talk about the future or the past, however, even to tell a story about something that happened earlier in the day. Interestingly, grickets are born with the ability to speak quite well and seem to acquire an adult vocabulary within the first few weeks of life. Is the gricket communication closer to the communication typically seen in humans or in animals? Please justify your answer

20. Classmate Question 17 • According to Chomsky, “The language children acquire is intricate and subtle, and the sample of speech given to them during the course of language development is anything but. Therefore, although parents may assist the child’s language development in some ways and influence the rate of development somewhat, the pattern of development is based not on parental speech but on innate language knowledge.” Do you agree or disagree with this comment? Give one piece of evidence in support of your argument.

21. Classmate Question 18 • Briefly state how the motor and auditory theories of speech perception differ. Would the following two facts contradict or support the motor theory? Why or why not? • Facts: • Chinchillas and infants both display categorical perception. • Adults knowledge of articulation has been shown to affect speech perception.

22. Classmate Question 19 • Manny, David, and Julian were all born in the Dominican Republican, where they learned Spanish as their first language. However, at five, Julian moved to Boston, where his parents enrolled him in an English-speaking elementary school. Nine years later, at 14, David followed Julian to Boston and enrolled in an English-speaking high school. Manny did not follow his friends to the United States until he was 25, but after joining his friends in Boston, Manny enrolled in an ESL class. • The three of them have all been practicing the phrase “I am going to Disney World” How would Manny, David, and Julian's speech sound to your native ear? • If you placed Manny, David, and Julian's brains in a scanner while they were speaking, how would the resulting images compare? Would you be able to predict approximately at what age Manny, Julian, and David moved to Boston just by looking at their brain images?

23. Classmate Question 20 • In the absolute newest study to come out in next year’s April 1st Issue of JENL (Journal on English as an Nth Language), a study examined sentence processing in individuals who acquired a second language after puberty. • Participants were given the following two sentences with both supportive and neutral contexts: • Ashley put the exam in front of her in her bag. • Ashley put the exam in front of her and picked up the pencil. • The study found that the nonnative speakers, spend less time on the sentence (b) regardless of context. This is in contrast to native speakers who find that the supportive context made (a) equally fast to read/process as (b). • What does this imply about the initial syntactic processing stage for the non-native speakers in comparison to the native speakers.

24. Classmate Question 21 • Catch phrase is a game where teammates try to help each other guess words or phrases without using any gestures and without using any words within the phrase. In the context of what we've learned in class so far, provide a strategy that players can help their teammates guess the correct word or phrase.

25. Classmate Question 22 • Imagine 3 patients, one of whom has had a lesion to the left hemisphere of the brain at birth, one at seven years of age, and one at fourteen. Discuss how you might expect them to differ in terms of language acquisition, production and processing.