Child Language: Acquisition and Development
Student Resources
Multiple Choice Quizzes
Take the quiz to test your understanding before reading the chapter. Afterwards, take it again to see how you’ve improved!
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1. Child A is 1;1, while child B is 1;11. We can say that ______.
- Child B is 10 weeks older than child A
- Child A’s language level is 10 months behind that of child B
- Child A is 10 days younger than child B
- Child B is 10 months older than child A
Answer:
d. Child B is 10 months older than child A
2. Morphology is the study of ______.
- how words change over time
- units of sound as encoded in the grammar
- how grammar changes over time
- units of meaning as encoded in the grammar
Answer:
d. units of meaning as encoded in the gramma
3. A typical newborn baby ______.
- understands more than 10 words
- understands fewer than 10 words
- can only detect low-frequency sounds
- can make vegetative sounds
Answer:
d. can make vegetative sounds
4. The unborn child becomes sensitive to sound in the ______ trimester of pregnancy:
- first
- second
- third
- fourth
Answer:
c. third
5. The Cat in the Hat experiment (DeCasper and Spence, 1986) demonstrated that the unborn child can ______.
- recognize simple words from nursery rhymes
- use the rhythm of a nursery rhyme to help them recognize simple words
- recognize a nursery rhyme from its intonation pattern
- use the intonation of a nursery rhyme to help them recognize simple words
Answer:
c. recognize a nursery rhyme from its intonation pattern
6. In the domain of child language acquisition, a nativist believes that ______.
- the child’s native language is the first one they hear while still in the womb
- the child’s knowledge of grammar is, for the most part, genetically determined
- the child can recognize their native language from birth
- the child’s knowledge of language is, for the most part, genetically determined
Answer:
b. the child’s knowledge of grammar is, for the most part, genetically determined
7. For many children, once they have acquired about 50 words, the rate of word learning ______.
- accelerates dramatically
- levels off
- slows down slightly
- levels off for 18 months, then accelerates dramatically
Answer:
a. accelerates dramatically
8. The gavagai problem demonstrates the difficulty faced by the child in ______.
- pronouncing polysyllabic words
- identifying the words in a sentence
- determining what a word refers to
- learning foreign language words
Answer:
c. determining what a word refers to
9. By the age of six years, the average child has a vocabulary of ______ words.
- 100–400
- 1,000–4,000
- 100–140
- 10,000–14,000
Answer:
d. 10,000–14,000
10. A morpheme is the smallest unit of ______.
- sound
- meaning
- vocabulary
- grammar
Answer:
b. meaning
11. In Berko (1958), the nonsense word wug is used because ______.
- a real word would distract the child from the experimental task
- wug is easy to pronounce and remember
- the experiment is concerned with morphology not sense
- the experimenter can control the input to the child
Answer:
d. the experimenter can control the input to the child
12. Which syntactic categories do the following words belong to: tree, red, delirium, hope, lazy and coy?
- nouns and verbs
- nouns, verbs and adjectives
- verbs, adjectives and prepositions
- nouns and adjectives
Answer:
d. nouns and adjectives
13. In the sentence The duck is gorping the bunny, the agent of the sentence is ______.
- duck
- gorping
- bunny
- absent
Answer:
a. duck
14. If we compare the domains of perceptual-motor, cognitive, social and linguistic development, it is apparent that development ______.
- in each domain proceeds at roughly the same pace
- is difficult to compare in terms of speed
- is fastest in the linguistic domain
- is slowest in the linguistic domain
Answer:
b. is difficult to compare in terms of speed
15. In child language research, Noam Chomsky is famous for arguing that ______.
- certain aspects of grammatical knowledge are genetically determined
- grammar is innate
- certain aspects of grammatical knowledge are socially determined
- grammar is acquired
Answer:
a. certain aspects of grammatical knowledge are genetically determined