Semantics
What is a fuzzy concept? Provide an example.
Concepts that vary in the range of their definitions, without clear-cut boundaries. Ex: tall, funny, rich
What is aphasia?
a disorder, often resulting from some kind of head trauma or brain disease, that cause difficulties in communication and production of speech.
What are some differences between First Language Acquisition and SLA?
- 2nd languages must be taught; they are not learned intuitively.
- L2's change your mental language system by interacting with your L1.
L2's can be lost without practice; first langs are subconscious.
Describe 'code-switching'
- an intentional change in using a different language or dialect based on the social context.
- can include switching for an entire conversation, or simply switching words within a sentence
Describe differences between polysemy and homophony.
homophony: sound the same; completely unrelated meanings
polysemy: a word that has multiple different but semantically related definitions
What are the differences between Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia?
- Broca's: motor aphasia; affects articulation of speech in phonetics, syntax, and morphology
- Wernicke's: 'fluent' aphasia, able to articulate whole words and syntactic accuracy, semantic impairment and speech production that makes no sense.
What is an interlanguage grammar?
The mental representation of language in which L1's and L2's influence each other
Give an example of language prejudice.
- a DMV in Hawaii refused to hire a Filipino immigrant solely based on his foreign accent
- an elementary teacher says that children speaking a non-standard dialect are 'incorrect'.
- assuming a person is not intelligent because they have a Southern accent
Explain the connotation and denotation of the word: dirty
- connotation: it makes a mess, it's bad, it's unhygenic
- denotation: something that has dirt on or in it, something that is not clean.
How do patients with Broca's aphasia feel about their condition?
- frustration, because they know what the right thing to say is but cannot produce it.
Describe an example of an L1 phonological transfer in a person's L2.
- phonological: Spanish-native English L2's who add 'e' before s-initial English words, because Spanish words do not start with 's'.
List 5 factors that can influence the way a person speaks.
age, gender, social class, geography, ethnicity, community, politics, religion
How can you tell if one statement is an entailment of another?
- it provides no new information
- the order of statement a and b cannot be reversed. (asymmetrical relation)
Why don't patients with Wernicke's aphasia realise they don't make sense?
- Because the area of their brain that is damaged influences speech perception and information processing; they don't have the ability to understand what they're saying, either.
Describe an example of syntactic or morphological transfer of a person's L1 into their L2.
syntactic: French L1's learning English may place the main verb before an adverb - 'He drinks often beer.'
morphological: applying expected tense morphemes to irregular verbs (go > goed, instead of went)
- lexical: false cognates between languages.
Describe some features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
- reduction of word-final consonants in clusters (test >tes)
- 'th' word initial > 'd' (the man > 'duh' man)
syntactic: habitual 'be' > 'he be doing' ; deletion of to be verbs like in 'he cute'
morphologic: absence of possessive -'s (John hat), no change in 3s present verbs, I talk > he talk (not talks)
Turn this sentence into a presupposition:
Tim eats kung pao chicken.
- Tim started eating kung pao chicken.
- Tim ate the kung pao chicken.
- Tim is eating kung pao chicken again.
What does aphasia reveal to neurologists about the brain and language?
There is something important about these two areas, Broca's area and Wernicke's area, that are essential for brain functioning. It demonstrates what part of the brain is responsible for the 'language stuff'.
What does "focus on form" mean in SLA?
A teaching practice in L2 classrooms that uses both instruction in the language and correction of mistakes.
Describe some regional dialect variations in the US.
- lexical: soda vs coke vs pop, water fountain vs bubbler etc
- phonetic: low-back merger: cot & caught vowel sounds merge.[ɔ] & [ɒ]