Psych/Ling 447 Psychology of Language
Exam 2 Autumn 2013
1. Which of the following stimulus do people generally respond to MOST RAPIDLY, in a word/nonword
decision task?
a. READ
b. DAER
c. DRPB
d. BEER
2. Which brain wave does the underlined word in the sentence “The baby bought the candy” elicit?
a. P600
b. N400
c. Both an N400 and a P600
d. Neither a P600 nor an N400
3. You are recording a person’s eye movements as they read the sentence “The doctor believed the
patient was unwell.” You are MOST LIKELY to observe (according to the class lecture)
a. regressive eye movements after the reader fixates on the word believed.
b. regressive eye movements after the reader fixates on the word patient.
c. regressive eye movements after the reader fixates on the word was.
d. that the person reads straight through the sentence without showing any regressive eye movements.
4. You are recording a person’s eye movements as they read the sentence “The crime scene investigated
by the police . . ..” You are MOST LIKELY to observe (according to the class lecture):
a. regressive eye movements after the reader fixates on the words crime scene.
b. regressive eye movements after the reader fixates on the word investigated.
c. regressive eye movements after the reader fixates on the word by.
d. that the person read straight through the sentence without showing any regressive eye movements.
5. Which of the following word recognition models relies heavily on the notion of “spreading activation?”
a. search model
b. activation/network model
c. parallel parsing model
d. word shape model
6. What of the following most directly makes deterministic parsing difficult for a natural language?
a. The complexity of phrase structure rules.
b. The prevalence of ambiguous words.
c. The prevalence of syntactic ambiguity.
d. The presence of a rich semantic context.
7. According to the article entitled “The Science of Word Recognition,” when we read we tend to initially
fixate on
a. the initial letters of the word.
b. just to the left of the middle of the word.
c. just to the right of the middle of the word.
d. randomly within a word.
8. With respect of stop consonants, F2 locus is used by English speakers for the perception of
a. the voiced/voiceless categories.
b. manner of articulation.
c. place of articulation.
d. vowel perception.
9. A native speaker of English hears a string of computer-generated syllables, each of which sounds like
a stop consonant followed by a vowel. The stimuli are identical except that the voice onset time (VOT) is
manipulated. Three stimuli are presented, with VOT values varying between 0 and 60 milliseconds.
Given our discussion in class, which pair of sounds would be perceived to be most different?
a. 0 and 25 ms VOT pair
b. 35 and 55 ms VOT pair
c. 25 and 35 ms VOT pair
d. 5 and 20 ms VOT pair
10. The speech error “By the time I got the park trucked” is a(n)
a. word stranding exchange
b. word exchange
c. morpheme shift
d. word shift
11. Which of the following is the most relevant reason for claiming that the “beads on a string” model of
speech perception is wrong?
a. Speech perception of stop consonants is categorical, whereas the underlying acoustic changes are
continuous.
b. The acoustic properties that define a phoneme are always invariantly present when that phoneme is
articulated.
c. Successive phonemes are articulated simultaneously.
d. Even babies perceive speech sounds categorically.
12. In his wonderful chapter 6 on the sounds of speech, Pinker describes the McGurk effect. He
concludes that although the effect is an astonishing illusion,
a. it is observed only under certain restrictive conditions.
b. it has little to tell us about “normal” speech perception.
c. it is just another example of the dominance of vision for the human species.
d. all speech perception is an illusion.
13. Pinker notes that when we try to ay “NPR,” despite our best efforts it usually ends up sounding more
like “MPR.” This is most directly due to:
a. the tendency of fluent speakers to become lazy articulators.
b. coarticulation.
c. the difficulty of perceiving place of articulation cues.
d. the variable nature of manner of articulation cues.
14. According to the readings, the model of word recognition that is currently accepted by psychologists in
the:
a. word shape model.
b. serial letter recognition model.
c. parallel letter recognition model.
d. search model.
15. In class, we discussed a movie titled “Let him have it!”. The movie’s name, and indeed the movie
itself, illustrates the importance of the distinction between:
a. literal and non-literal meanings.
b. necessary and elaborative inferences.
c. semantic and thematic roles.
d. cops and robbers.
16. The psychologist David Swinney performed an experiment involving ambiguous words such as bug,
presented in a context that biased interpretation strongly toward one meaning of the word. Swinney’s
results suggested that:
a. the context is used predictively, so that only the contextually relevant meaning of an ambiguous word is
retrieved from the reader’s/listener’s mental lexicon.
b. the context is used “retrospectively;” all meanings of the word are momentarily activated, with context
selecting from the activated concepts.
c. only the most frequently used meaning of an ambiguous word is initially activated, with other meanings
becoming active if the most frequent one is not the contextually appropriate meaning.
d. lexical access is an unsystematic process, and no general conclusions were possible.
17. Which of the following word recognition models was designed to explicitly account for the word/nonword/pseudoword effect?
a. search model
b. activation/network model
c. serial parser model
d. parallel parser model
18. Which of the following word recognition models relies heavily on the notion of “spreading activation?”
a. search model
b. activation/network model
c. parallel parsing model
d. word shape model
19. What makes deterministic parsing difficult for a natural language?
a. complexity of phrase structure roles.
b. the existence of traces.
c. syntactic ambiguity.
d. all of the above.
20. The concepts of “agent” and “patient” are best construed to be associated with
a. lexical semantics.
b. structural semantics.
c. discourse processing.
d. inferencing.
21. Identifying the necessary and sufficient concepts that define a word is the goal of
a. prototype theory.
b. feature theory.
c. activation/network models.
d. search models.
22. As noted in the chapter on semantics by Yule, the sentence “He drank the whole bottle” sounds
absurd if taken literally, even though we all instantly know what it means. This is an example of:
a. collocation.
b. metonymy.
c. polysemy
d. homoymy
23. According to the class lecture, we produce about ___ words and ____ phonemes per second in fluent
speech.
a. 5; 20
b. 3; 15
c. 10; 30
d. 7; 15
24. As discussed by the authors of the assigned reading on the relationship between the words and
sound, which of the following claims seems plausible (if not definitively known)?
a. The relationship between the sound and the meaning of a word is always arbitrary in modern
languages.
b. There is a systematic relationship between the sound and meaning of nouns, but there is rarely such a
relationship for verbs.
c. The sound-meaning relationships for many words might be remnants of the very first words spoken by
humans.
d. Non-arbitrary sound-meaning relationships were never commonplace.
25. Which of the following models can best account for the fact that you recognize the word “nurse” much
faster when it is preceded by the word “doctor,” compared to when it is preceded by the word “proctor”?
a. search model
b. minimal attachment model
c. activation/network model
d. letter recognition model
26. The following ordering most accurately reflects the speech planning model described in class:
a. structure  meaning  sound
b. sound  structure  meaning
c. meaning  structure  sound
d. meaning  sound  structure
27. The assignment of proper syntax to each word in the speech act you are planning occurs in the ____
stage.
a. lexical
b. lexeme
c. lemma
d. production
QUESTIONS 28-30 ARE EACH WORTH 2 POINTS
28. According to the model of speech planning discussed in class and in the readings, which stage of
speech planning did the error “a real rack pack”” (intended: “a real pack rat”) occur?
a. lexical
b. lexeme
c. lemma
d. self-monitoring
29. At which stage of speech planning did the error “You really put use to knowledge” (where the intended
utterance is “You really put knowledge to use”) most likely occur?
a. lexical
b. lexeme
c. lemma
d. self-monitoring
30. The speech error “I disregard that as precise” (intended: “I regard that as imprecise”) most likely
occurred during which network associated with speech planning?
a. lexical
b. lemma
c. lexeme
d. articulating