Language & Brain
Acquisition of words
Word recognition
Bonus
Challenge?
100
True or False: People with Broca's aphasia have the lesion in the same brain area.
False
Only 50-60% of patients with lesions in Broca’s area have a persisting Broca’s aphasia (Dronkers et al., 2000; 2004).
100
Which of the following words would be the easiest for children to learn without any linguistic context according to Gillette et al.’s (1999) study?
a. think
b. luck
c. wander
d. flower
Flower
- Noun is easier than verb
- concrete ones are easier than abstract ones
100
Which of the following word pairs would be expected to show semantic priming effects?
a. dog - CAR
b. shoes - CARDS
c. pine - PALM TREE
d. chocolate - HEART
pine - PALM TREE
100
True or false:
Syntactic bootstrapping means that a learning process in which the interpretation of verbs is guided by the syntactic structure of sentences.
True
100
True or false:
Cohort model assumes that contextual cues are the more crucial part of auditory word recognition
False! Cohort model assumes the left edge (onset) of the word is the most crucial part of auditory word recognition.
200
What brain imaging techniques can answer localization questions?
fMRI, PET, MEG
200
Please arrange the following words in the order of subordinate - basic - superordinate level.
Tree
Plant
Willow
Willow - Tree - Plant
200
True or False:
Dual route model aims to account for spoken word acquisition.
False, it's for written word recognition
200
True or false:
Patients with Broca’s aphasia have no difficulties in understanding all the syntactic structures.
False
They also show impairment in their comprehension of syntactic structure that doesn’t just rely on the word order:
The boy is being chased by the girl.
The boy who is pulling the girl is mad.
The girl is kissing the boy that the clown hit.
200
Provide a pair of words that form a morphological neighborhood.
eg. lock & unlock/locker
300
What ERP component do we expect to observe from reading "A cat are running"?
P600
Associated with unexpected syntactic (grammatical) structures
300
If children learn that “pony” and “horse” refer to the same object, what assumption is violated?
a. Whole object assumption
b. Mutual exclusivity principle
c. Meronymic hypothesis
d. Taxonomic Hypothesis
Mutual exclusivity principle
Children tend to assign one label to a single object and avoid assigning a second label to the same object
300
Which spoken word recognition model can help us account for Mondegreen?
TRACE model
Cohort model - missing the first sound means that we won’t be able to recognize the word
300
What ERP component would we expect to observe from the following example?
N400
is associated with unexpected lexical (word) information
300
True or false:
The term 'word neighborhood' refers to words that are only related in terms of their meaning.
False, words can be related in terms of meaning, form, or morphology.
400
What is the ERP component illustrated in the figure below?
N400
The negative voltage happens around 400 ms
400
How many argument does the verb have in the following sentence?
"Messi sent a gift to every player."
3 (Messi, a gift, every player)
400
Under the Dual route model, which route you might use in recognizing the following word?
"rhythm"
Direct route
Direct route: we recognize the meaning just by reading grapheme (irregular words - no relationship with sound, memorization)
Assembled phonology route: we recognize the meaning through sounds (regular words - know how they will be pronounced, use this pronunciation to search meaning)
400
What is the concept that this cartoon illustrates?
a. homophone
b. polysemy
c. homograph
polysemy
Words that sound the same, spelled the same. The meaning is different but related (Usually in the same part of speech)
400
True or false:
The connectionist model assumes that within irregular cases, it is still possible to find rules.
True
Regular-irregular is a spectrum/continuum. Within irregular cases, it is still possible to find patterns (e.g. sign, benign, align)
500
In the following sentences, which key word would elicit the greatest N400 effect?
a. The pizza is too hot to cry
b. The pizza is too hot to drink
c. The pizza is too hot to eat
500
True or false:
Using “blue jay” for all the birds is an instance of children under-extending the category.
False, it's over-extension.
500
True or False:
The results from Jared & Seidenberg’s (1991) showed that we usually use the direct route for low-frequency word recognition. (Hint: Frequency-by-regularity interaction and dual route model)
False, we use the assembled phonology route for low-frequency words
High-frequency words: direct (visual) route wins
Low-frequency words: assembled phonological route wins
500
Which of the following word sequences would be expected to show mediated semantic priming effects?
a. purple- (orange) - red
b. war - (peace) - quiet
c. pine - (pie) - pipe
d. tree - (trunk) - branch
war - (peace) - quiet
500
What does "thematic roles" mean? Is there evidence suggesting children make use of thematic roles in learning new words?
Thematic role characterizes the relationship between the participant and the event (ex: "Sally waters her plants"). 21-month-olds could use the concepts of agent and patient to figure out the meaning of a verb-like nonword. (ex: “The girl is gorping the boy” vs “The boy is gorping the girl”)