Multiple Choice Questions

1. Exposure to some maternal hormones before birth may result in the child having

  1. borderline personality disorders in later life
  2. lower levels of emotional response
  3. an insecure attachment
  4. none of these

Answer: A

2. What is a teratogen?

  1. a noxious substance found in soil that crosses the maternal placental barrier
  2. a hormonal trigger that stimulates excessive cell growth in the embryo
  3. an allergen that affects both mother and foetus
  4. a substance or environmental influence that affects the development of the foetus and results in physical abnormalities

Answer: D

3. Foetal alcohol syndrome results in

  1. attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
  2. poor sleep patterns
  3. changes in brain structure and behavioural problems
  4. blindness

Answer: C

4. One difficulty of experimental research involving infant perception is

  1. they tire quickly
  2. a parent has to be present
  3. pre-verbal infants become easily distracted
  4. they cannot relate to the researcher

Answer: C

5. What does the preferential looking technique assume?

  1. young infants prefer to look at familiar objects
  2. young infants are afraid of looking at unfamiliar objects
  3. young infants have an innate predisposition to respond to novel stimuli
  4. young infants learn to respond to novel stimuli

Answer: C

6. Preferential sucking technique is used to test an infant’s preference for

  1. sounds and voices
  2. tastes
  3. faces and voices
  4. smells and textures

Answer: A

7. Infants use imitation to

  1. increase the bond with their primary caregiver
  2. communicate
  3. make sense of information provided by the average face
  4. get what they want

Answer: C

8. The ‘visual cliff’ experiment was used to demonstrate that an infant has

  1. distance perception
  2. depth perception
  3. space perception
  4. volume perception

Answer: B

9. What did Quinn (2006) hypothesize we have in place to allow the categorization of objects in the first 6 months of life?

  1. neural architecture
  2. hormone triggers
  3. spatial awareness
  4. none of these

Answer: A

10. In which stage did Piaget say that infants are essentially limited in their thinking and show a primitive understanding of objects in their environment?

  1. the concrete operational stage
  2. the formal operational stage
  3. the sensorimotor stage
  4. preoperational stage

Answer: C

11. What is egocentric thinking?

  1. thinking that takes into account other people
  2. thinking that is focussed on the feelings of others
  3. thinking that has little regard for others
  4. thinking that is a mix of the three

Answer: C

12. An internal cognitive map of stimuli is also called a

  1. road map
  2. internal map
  3. mental representation
  4. wiring map

Answer: C

13. Harris (1973) criticized Piaget’s claims about infants’ abilities to distinguish between objects and their own actions because

  1. infants have a short attention span
  2. infants have a fragile short-term memory
  3. infants have reduced cognition
  4. infants get distracted by shiny things

Answer: B

14. What is prosody?

  1. tone, pitch and rhythm of speech
  2. pitch, intonation and depth of speech
  3. tone, depth and stress of speech
  4. rhythm, stress and intonation of speech

Answer: D

15. Which of the following lists of words best fits the following statement?

It was found that the foetuses’ heart rates ______ when they heard a familiar ______, indicating that they recognized the ______ of speech sounds.

  1. decreased, rhyme, sequence
  2. increased, voice, pitch
  3. increased, song, tone
  4. decreased, sentence, speed

Answer: A

16. It has been found that infants can notice elements of speech when

  1. it’s played quieter
  2. it’s played louder
  3. it’s played forwards
  4. it’s played backwards

Answer: C

17. In order to acquire language, an infant needs which two things?

  1. vocabulary and grammar
  2. grammar and hearing
  3. vision and vocabulary
  4. vision and hearing

Answer: A

18. At 2 years of age, an infant’s language mainly consists of

  1. cooing
  2. one-word utterances
  3. two-word sentences
  4. sentences of three words or longer

Answer: C

19. Infants begin to babble at

  1. 5 months
  2. 7 months
  3. 9 months
  4. 11 months

Answer: B

20. Which of the following statements is TRUE?

  1. hearing infants of deaf parents never babble, they only use hand signals
  2. hearing infants of deaf parents’ babies do continue to babble, but with hand signals instead
  3. hearing infants of deaf parents mix babbling and hand signals throughout infancy
  4. hearing infants of deaf parents babble and do not use hand signals until much later

Answer: B

21. Skinner (1957) suggested that children learn language because of

  1. reinforcement from adults
  2. experimenting with sounds
  3. simply imitating others
  4. an innate skill to develop language

Answer: A

22. Which of the following is a criticism of Skinner’s theory of language development?

  1. children make mistakes that adults do not make
  2. children reinvent language
  3. adults do not correct children’s grammar
  4. all of these

Answer: C

23. Motherese is better known as

  1. babbling
  2. learning through imitation
  3. child-directed speech
  4. operant conditioning

Answer: C

24. What are protoconversations?

  1. interactions between infants of a similar age
  2. the monologues infants use to reinforce the words they have learned
  3. early turn-taking behaviour between adults and infants
  4. adults labelling the objects in the infant’s environment

Answer: C

25. What are the three stages of Ainsworth et al.’s (1978) ‘strange situation’?

  1. interaction, separation, reunion
  2. play, stranger introduction, parent abandonment
  3. isolation, reunion, play
  4. interaction, alienation, stranger introduction

Answer: A

26. Which of the four attachment types was added at a later date?

  1. disorganized
  2. secure
  3. insecure
  4. ambivalent/resistant

Answer: A

27. Insecurely attached or maltreated children are more likely to

  1. have learning difficulties
  2. develop emotional disorders
  3. break the law
  4. develop obsessive compulsive disorder

Answer: B

28. Which of the following words best fit the following statement?

During the ______ year of life, children’s relationships with their peers are characterized by ______ behaviour, but as infants approach their ______ birthday, they will begin to engage in ______ behaviour.

  1. second, antisocial, second, prosocial
  2. first, shy, first, confident
  3. first, prosocial, first, aggressive
  4. second, confident, second, antisocial

Answer: C

29. During the first year of life, infants begin to develop a sense of self-awareness. This involves the development of the subjective self and the objective self. What is the subjective self?

  1. the recognition that the individual is separate from others
  2. the recognition that the self is something that is an object with properties
  3. the recognition that the individual is a part of the group
  4. the recognition that the self is the same as others

Answer: A

30. What are the processes that a child must go through in order to develop gender categorization?

  1. gender identity, gender stability, gender consistency
  2. gender stereotype, gender identity, gender distinction
  3. gender stability, gender distinction, gender consistency,
  4. gender discrimination, gender stability, gender stereotype

Answer: A

31. Gender identity involves

  1. the recognition that people remain the same gender throughout their life
  2. knowing that people’s biological sex remains the same, even though their appearance can change
  3. the infant being able to correctly label other people according to their gender
  4. discovering that certain roles are assigned to men compared to women

Answer: C

32. At what age do children show a preference for gender-stereotyped toys?

  1. 12 months
  2. 18 months
  3. 24 months
  4. 30 months

Answer: B