Intro Ling
What is modality of language?
How that language is produced and perceived / the “medium” of the language (e.g., spoken, written, signed)
What is an allophone?
Different realizations of the same phoneme
What term describes words that have the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings, such as the two meanings of bank (river bank vs. financial institution)?
Homophone
What is the difference between derivational and inflectional morphology?
Derivational: Morphology that changes the meaning or category of its base
Inflectional: Morphology that expresses grammatical information appropriate to a word’s category
What is the term for the mental dictionary, or repository of word knowledge, that native speakers possess, containing information about a word's sound, meaning, and grammatical function?
The lexicon
What is the fundamental difference between prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar?
Prescriptive grammar tells speakers how they should use language (rules of "correctness"), while descriptive grammar describes how language is actually used by native speakers (without judgment).
What are the three articulatory dimensions in the articulation of vowels?
Frontness, height, lip-rounding
What is the specific semantic relationship where the truth of the first sentence guarantees the truth of the second sentence?
Entailment
What is the term for an affix that is inserted within the root of a word, not at the beginning or end?
An infix
What do fMRIs use to detect brain activity?
Changes in blood flow and oxygenation
The phonemes, /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, and /ʔ/ all belong to which manner of articulation?
Plosives
Which articulators make up labiodental POA?
Lower lip + Upper teeth
What type does the indefinite article “a” and the definite article “the” return?
<< e, t > e>
Compounds that have a head are called endocentric, compounds that don’t have a head are called exocentric, what are co-headed compounds called? (spelling counts!)
Dvandva compounds!
Describe the difference between the ‘ventral’ and ‘dorsal’ streams of language processing.
The ventral stream processes “what” knowledge, such as word meanings, while the dorsal stream processes “where/how” knowledge, such as the processing of sounds, planning of articulation, and the repetition of words.
What is a minimal pair?
A set of two words that are identical except for a single sound/phoneme that creates two different meanings
What is the difference between omnidirectional and directional microphones?
Directional: only sensitive from the back or sides
Explain the two meanings of "everyone in this room speaks two languages"
1) Everyone in this room is such that they [=everyone] speak two languages
2) There are two languages such that everyone in the room speaks them [=two languages]
For the word "unkindness", what is the correct order of affixation (for "un-" and "-ness") and why?
1) attach "un-" to the adjective root "kind" to build the adjective "unkind"
2) attach "-ness" to "unkind" to get the noun "unkindness"
Why?:
"un-" only attaches to verbs and adjectives, not to nouns and "-ness" attaches to adjectives to create nouns. If "-ness" attached first, it would turn the "kind" into a noun, and "un-" would no longer have the right kind of base to attach to!
Where are the electrodes placed when conducting electrocorticography (ECoG)?
They are implanted onto the neural tissue!
What are the 3 mechanisms of speech production?
Respiration at the lungs, phonation at the larynx, and articulation in the mouth
Explain what happens in thoracic breathing vs. abdominal breathing
Thoracic: contracting the external intercostal muscles results in a outwards turn of the ribs, which makes the thorax larger and results in lower air pressure inside the lungs
Abdominal: the diaphragm is slightly domed upwards when at rest but can be flattened when tensed; enlarging the lung cavity downward results in lower air
pressure inside the lungs
Explain the differences between quantifiers "all", "some" and "no/none"
all: set #1 is a subset of set #2
some: the intersection of set #1 and #2 is not empty
no/none: the intersection of set #1 and #2 is empty
Give an example of a:
- Adjective-Noun compound
- Noun-Adjective compound
- Noun-Verb compound
Examples:
- Adjective-Noun compound: greenhouse, bluebird
- Noun-Adjective compound: trustworthy, watertight
- Noun-Verb compound: manhandle, sidestep
What was the name of the man who amazingly survived an accident in which an iron rod went through his left cheek and out the top of his head, and who was subject to studies that provided proof for brain localization?
Phineas Gage