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Here is the study guide for week 8 (Language). I will add more questions after the next two lectures. Always check for updates!
STUDY GUIDE
FROM CHAPTER 9
1. Describe Chomsky's distinction between "competence" and "performance". How can we study linguistic competence?
2. What are "deep structure" and "surface structure" in Chomsky's generative grammar? What are the sets of rules that according to Chomsky allow us to generate all the possible well-formed sentences?
3. What is the basic unit of phonology? Does it correspond to a letter?
4. What is parsing? What is an important aspect of English syntax?
5. What are language universals? Describe some important language universals identified by Hockett.
6. What did Whorf propose in his Linguistic relativity hypothesis? Does experimental evidence support Whorf's theory?
7. Which types of errors are commonly observed in speech? What does the analysis of errors suggest about speech?
8. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas are associated to two different types of aphasia. Briefly describe the main characteristics of the speech of patients with lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas.
9. Is the American Sign Language (ASL) a real language? Motivate your answer.
FROM CHAPTER 10
1. What is a spectrogram? Is it possible to segment speech in words only on the basis on physical characteristics of the sound as represented in a spectrogram?
2. What is the voice-onset time (VOT)? Describe Eimans and Corbit's experiment (what is the variable manipulated? What is the dependent variable?) and the results showed in Figure 10.7. What do these results suggest about phoneme perception?
3. Describe the McGurk effect. What do you think this effect demonstrates about speech perception?
4. Which three assumptions have been proposed to study speech signal? Describe three violations of these assumptions.
5. What are the assumptions of the motor theory of speech comprehension? Talk about experimental evidence that supports these assumptions.
6. What is the main assumption of Massaro's fuzzy logical model? What is the experimental evidence that supports this model? Why are these results against the idea of a specialized speech processor?
7. According to Farmer and Klein (1996), what is the basic cognitive deficit in individuals with dyslexia? Do they think that dyslexia is a pure linguistic deficit?
8. Describe eye movements during reading (saccades, fixations, regressions). How long does a saccade last? How long does a fixation last? How many characters are encoded during a single fixation?
9. Describe McConkie's model of eye-movement control in reading. What are the problems with this model?
10. Describe Morrison's model of eye-movement control in reading. What is an essential feature of this model?
11. Describe Tulving and Gold's experiment on the effect of context on word identification.
12. Describe Morton's logogen model. What are the components of this model? How does the logogen model explain word identification?
13. Describe McClelland and Rumelhart connectionist model of word identification.
14. What is an anaphora? What is the distance effect?
15. Briefly describe the three types of inference that we make while reading text.
FROM THE LECTURES:
1. Why do we talk about "categorical perception" in phonology? How does phonological perception develop in infants?
2. What is syntax? How is syntax learned in children? Does age of acquisition of a second language have an effect on syntactical competence?
3. What is the unit of meaning? Does it correspond to a word?
4. What is pragmatics? Give an example of the use of pragmatics in language
5. Give a definition of LANGUAGE and briefly comment it.
6. What is displacement? Why is this property of language important?
7. Miller proposed two additional levels of analysis of language in addition to the traditional three (phonology, syntax, semantics). What are they? Give an example.
8. What is "phonemic competence"?
9. What is a spectrogram? Can we find some physical difference in a spectrogram that allows us to segment speech in words? Which cues do we probably use to segment speech?
10. What is the difference between competence and performance in Chomsky's theory?
11. What is the difference between deep and surface structure in Chomsky's theory?
12. Briefly describe Chomsky's transformational grammar theory. What is the purpose of this theory? Which sets of rules did Chomsky proposed?
13. Often we use syntactic transformation to convey a particular meaning in a sentence. Give some example of "semantic" use of syntax.
14. Describe Fillmore's Case grammar model. What is a semantic case? What are the two assumptions of this model?
15. What is a "garden-path" sentence? Describe an empirical study that investigates this type of sentences and discuss its results. Lecture Wed, May 20th
16. Describe the lexical decision task. Which mental operations are performed during this task? What is the word frequency effect and which stage of processing is involved in this effect?
17. Describe the experimental paradigm used to study priming. Describe Marcel's (1980) study and the effect of masked primes on semantically related probes.
18. Describe the two experiments by Neely and the theoretical consequences of his findings.
19. How do eye movement studies contribute to the study of cognitive processing during reading? Describe the technique, the main results and which kind of information it is possible to extract from these data.
20. What are the two assumption on which eye movements studies of reading are based?
21. Describe eye movement patterns during readings in good and poor readers.
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