Learner Resource 6
Consensus Doughnut
Answer the questions below while either reading (or better still watching) Pinker’s lecture
on Linguistics as a window to understanding the brain. The lecture can be found here:
http://www.floatinguniversity.com/lectures-pinker
1. What does Pinker identify as the key questions posed by the existence of language?
2. Approximately how many languages are spoken on Earth?
3. What point does Darwin make about language?
4. What three things must you avoid confusing language with, according to Pinker?
5. What two invented rules does Pinker cite?
6. There are four ‘proofs’ offered that language isn’t thought. Explain why each one
does/doesn’t make sense to you.
7. What three topics does Pinker divide language into?
8. What is Pinker’s estimated rate of learning from the age of one upwards? How many words
would a typical high school graduate (18yo) know?
9. What is the point of “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”?
10. Draw a basic sentence tree for “I told him that it was sunny outside”.
11. Why do linguists insist that language must be composed out of phrase structural rules?
Note down and explain the three reasons given.
12. Pinker presents three pieces of evidence to support Chomsky’s Universal Grammar theory.
Summarise each piece of evidence. You must include reference to the Wug test.
13. List the parts of the body that are required to produce speech.
14. What is the evolutionary bargain made to allow us to speak?
15. What makes speech recognition so difficult for computers? Make three points.
16. Why are people so good at decoding potentially ambiguous statements?
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Child Language Acquisition
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Child Language Acquisition
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Copyright © OCR 2015