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Psychology 1320
Exam 2
Spring 2002
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Short Answer (20 points, 2 points each)
For each of the featural descriptions below (questions 1-10), fill in the letter of the
appropriate sound. All letters are used exactly once.
1. unvoiced alveolar stop ____ c
(a) // as in bat
2. voiced velar fricative ____ h
(b) /i/ as in beet
3. unvoiced palatal affricate ____ g
(c) /t/ as in tall
4. low front (unrounded, lax) vowel ____a
(d) /g/ as in give
5. (voiced) velar nasal ____ i
(e) /z/ as in zoo
6. voiced velar stop ____ d
(f) /m/ as in mill
7. voiced alveolar stop _____ j
(g) // as in choke
8. (voiced) bilabial nasal ____ f
(h) //, but not found in English
9. high front tense (unrounded) vowel __b
(i) /  / as in sing
10. voiced alveolar fricative ____ e
(j) /d/ as in desk

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More matching
Instructions:
 Choose options a-i to describe the phonological processes that explain the children’s
pronunciations of the adult words given in 10-20.
 Words in quotes are written in English orthography and refer to typical adult
pronunciation of the word. Words in slashes (//) are written in phonetic symbols and
refer to a child’s pronunciation. Most of the examples were observed in actual
children (by me).
 More than one of these choices may be true for any question. Use all that apply. You
do not have to list them in the right order (i.e., you do not have to go through the
derivation).
 Not all of the choices a-i have to be used.
 Note that some items have different letters than they did on the review sheet.
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
consonant cluster reduction, more sonorous consonant is deleted
consonant cluster reduction, less sonorous consonant is deleted
assimilation to place of articulation
reduplication
weak syllable or weak vowel omission (“weak” means unstressed)
stopping
final consonant deletion
voicing (not by assimilation)
11. “Tigger” (/tg r/)  /td r/
One process ___ (c-assimilation to place)
12. “living room” (//)  /l rum/
One process ____ (e-weak syllable omission)
13. “sock” (/sak/)  /tak/
One process ___ (f-stopping)
14. “Thomas” (/tam s/)  /tam tam/
One or two processes ___ (and ____) (d-reduplication, e-weak syl omission)
15. “crash” /kr/  /k/
Two processes ___ and ___ (a-cluster reduction; g-final cons deletion)
16. “snow” /sno/  /no/
One process ___ (b-consonant cluster reduction)
17. “bean” /bin/  /bi/
One process ___ (g-final cons del)
18. “santa” /s/  / /
Two processes ___ and ___ (a-cluster reduction; f-stopping)
19. “flower” /flau r/  /fau r/
One process ___ (a-cluster reduction)
20. “kite” (/kait/)  /dait/
Two processes ___ and ____ (h-voicing w/o assimilation; c-assimilation to place)
Short Answer
(30 points total, 5 each)
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I may take off points if your answer exceeds the indicated word limits.
21. (a) Using the following sample, calculate the MLU of the child’s speech. Show
your work.
Child: This | go | here. (3 morphemes)
Exp: No, I don’t think so.
Exp: This piece goes over here.
Child: Where | those | piece|s go? 5
Exp: The puppy took that piece, remember?
Child: Puppy | los|ed | that | piece. 5
Child: Piece | gone | now. 3
[pause]
Child: What | you | do|ing? 4
3 + 5 + 5 + 3 + 4 = 20 morphemes
20 morphemes / 5 lines = MLU of 4
(b) Which of Brown’s stages would this place the child in? Does her language seem
consistent with that stage? Why or why not?
Stage V. By Stage V, we expect to see sentences longer than 1 word; correct inflectional
morphology; questions; negation; and complex sentences. In the sample above, we see
some missing infection (and other function items, such as auxiliaries) and we see no
complex sentences. While we can’t tell for sure without seeing a larger sample from this
child, it looks like her language is not as complex as her MLU would predict.
22. List the three stages in the development of wh-questions, with an example of each
stage. (50 words or less)
1. no auxiliaries (“where mommy?”)
2. auxiliaries but no inversion (“where mommy is?”)
3. auxiliaries and inversion (adult-like) (“where is mommy?”)
23. Much research in prosodic bootstrapping asks whether there are pauses between
(phrase or clause) boundaries. Why is this the wrong question to ask (i.e., what is the
right question)? (Hint: Fernald & McRoberts emphasized the importance of this point.)
(50 words or less)
To test whether pauses may be used as cues, we have to ask whether they occur ONLY (or
much more often) between those syntactic boundaries (than otherwise). If they occur at
all the relevant boundaries but also occur in lots of other places, they would not make
very useful cues.
NOTE: Some students answered that the right question is whether babies can use this
prosodic information. I gave partial credit for that answer. Even though it is correct in
some sense, it is not as fundamental as the one posed in the test question.
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24. How is infant-directed speech different from adult-directed speech with respect to
prosody? (Hint: Fisher and Tokura’s study is relevant here, though you need not directly
cite it.) (35 words or less)
In IDS:
There many pauses at clause boundaries and few elsewhere.
Pitch and vowel-length modulation (especially before pauses) are exaggerated.
25. Describe one reason why verbs are harder to learn than nouns.
(35 words or less)
One possible answer: In speech to children, verbs tend to refer to things that have
happened or will happen; nouns tend to refer to concurrently observable things.
26. Two parts:
(a) Why, according to Fisher, Gleitman, and colleagues, is observation insufficient for
determining the meanings of contrasts between verbs such as give and receive or eat and
feed?
(b) Why are these verbs a problem for semantic bootstrapping?
(Use 50 words or less total)
a. These (pairs of) actions look exactly the same; the only difference is which
participant turns out to be the subject in a speaker’s description.
b. Semantic bootstrapping relies on observation to glean the meaning (and hence the
syntax) of the verb. In these cases, observation is ambiguous, so the semantic
bootstrapping algorithm will not help the child learn these verbs.
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Essay Questions
(30 points total, 15 points each)
Answer any TWO of the following three questions.
27. As a measure of linguistic maturity, MLU is useful for certain purposes but it has
limitations. When might MLU be a useful measure? When it is not useful? (That is,
what can it tell you and what can’t it tell you?)
In grading, I was looking for some mention of the following points:
Useful
MLU places children into one of Brown’s stages. We can then use the expected
accomplishments of those stages to either measure the child (i.e., evaluate whether his
language development is progressing as expected) or predict the child’s behavior (i.e., if
we know nothing but MLU, we can predict a host of abilities based on Brown’s
description of each stage). Therefore MLU is a “rough and ready” measure of a child’s
development.
Not useful
MLU is an average (mean length of utterance), so it has the limitations of any average.
It doesn’t tell us the range (how complex the child’s most impressive sentence is);. It
doesn’t tell us the distribution (whether the child uses a mix of very short and very long
sentences, or lots of sentences of the same length). Furthermore, it doesn’t tell us
definitively whether increasing MLU is due to the addition of bound morphemes and
function words (as Brown predicts), or whether it is due to longer telegraphic sentences.
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28. Describe the differences among prosodic, semantic, and syntactic bootstrapping.
Then describe how the three types of algorithms could work together in language
development.
In grading, I was looking for some mention of the following points:
Prosodic bootstrapping means using cues from intonation (pauses, syllable
lengthening, pitch modulation) to detect syntactic boundaries. Semantic bootstrapping
means using observation to determine the meaning of sentences and using that meaning
to decide among innately-given sentence structure (grammar) possibilities. Syntactic
bootstrapping means using observed (heard) sentence structure to disambiguate the
meaning of a verb.
Semantic and syntactic bootstrapping can work together to help the child acquire
grammar. Semantic bootstrapping is used “first” to (1) determine the basic word order
of the language and (2) determine the basic meaning of verbs. Then syntactic
bootstrapping takes over to help with more fine-grained learning, such as differentiating
the meaning of verb pairs like give-receive or eat-feed (which are ubiquitous in
language). Of course, the child will be moving back and forth between these
bootstrapping algorithms, first using semantics to get a rough meaning, and then using
syntactic to differentiate between ambiguous verb pairs.
Prosodic bootstrapping must occur prior to the other bootstrapping algorithms.
It is used to glean the most basic syntactic information: where clause boundaries and
possibly phrase boundaries fall. This information can help the child figure out where
individual words are and importantly where the nouns and verbs all. All this is essential
before semantic or syntactic bootstrapping can take place.
29. Describe the Gilette & Gleitman experiment, which used videotapes of parents and
children playing. How did they show that verbs are harder to learn from observation than
nouns?
In grading, I was looking for some mention of the following points:
G&G taped parents interacting naturally with their young children in a
laboratory setting. They then deleted the audio from the tapes and created two sets of
tapes: one with all the nouns represented as beeps and another with all the verbs
represented as beeps. They then each of these to one group of adults and asked them to
identify all the nouns (in the noun video) or all the verbs (in the verb video), telling the
participants which condition they were in.
G&G found that the adults were able to identify the correct noun from observing
the video over 90% of the time, but were able to identify the correct verb less than 10% of
the time.
This contrast indicates that verbs are harder than nouns to learn (or guess) from
observing the world.