By William B. McGregor
1) Human beings are genetically predisposed to speak the language of their biological parents.
True False
2) The child's acquisition of language is a staged process, which is broadly similar for all languages.
3) The normal child acquires a basic mastery of the language of the community it is born into by about what age?
1.5 years 2 years 2-3 years 4-5 years 8 years 12 years
4) Which of the following best describes telegraphic speech?
utterances are a single word long utterances have few lexical items utterances consist of lexical items, with few grammatical items utterances have no intonation contour the type of speech used by a mother to a child
5) Deaf children who are exposed to sign language learn it spontaneously.
6) Is caretaker speech characterised by high pitch in all languages?
Yes No
7) The earliest acquired consonants are generally:
stops and nasals glides rhotics laterals fricatives
8) Which of the following phone replacements are not expected in the speech of children?
Of velars by alveolars Of fricatives by stops Of alveolars by velars Of laterals by glides Of consonant clusters by single consonants
9) A general characteristic of language acquisition is that perception and recognition precedes production.
10) Consonants are most likely to be first produced correctly in which position?
end of a word in a consonant cluster beginning of a word between vowels
11) Morphology tends to acquired earlier in morphologically rich languages than in morphologically simple languages.
12) Which of the following is the most common type of semantic error made by children?
over-extension of meaning under-extension of meaning mismatch of meaning
13) Which of the following stages in acquisition of number marking on nouns in English occurs latest?
use of the allomorphs -s and -z all overgeneralizations are corrected existence of just a few high frequency irregular plural forms a single form for each noun, unmarked for number
14) The order of acquisition of words and grammatical structures accurately reflects their frequency in adult language usage.
15) Innateness refers to the idea that human beings are genetically endowed to acquire language generally, though not any particular language.
16) Can stages in acquisition of grammatical structures overlap?
17) It is impossible to acquire a native-like accent in a language learnt in adulthood.
True No
18) Does the fact that children may be unable to precisely immitate an utterance of a certain type argue against the role of immitation in acquisition?
19) The notion that word meanings can be inferred from the grammatical features of an utterance is called:
syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis semantic bootstrapping hypothesis poverty of the stimulus novel name-new category hypothesis hypothesis testing
20) Stages in acquisition of a second language in adulthood are:
identical with stages in acquiring first language in childhood completely different to stages of acquiring a first languge in childhood similar to, but not identical with stages of acquiring a first language in childhood non-existent: second languages are not learnt in stages
21) Is the critical period hypothesis supported by clear-cut biological evidence?
22) The system of a second language acquired in adulthood can affect (and change) a corresponding system in the person's first language.
23) Negative transfer is most easily corrected in phonetics and phonology.
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