HUMA 1010 midterm

  1. Linguists refer to “general linguistics” as the foundation for interdisciplinary fields

    psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and applied linguistics

  2. Why are phonetic symbols音標needed?

    • (a) English spelling and Chinese characters often do not show the actual pronunciation.
    • (b) A standard set of symbols are needed to show speech sounds in languages around the world.

  3. Types of speech sounds

    consonant (like / v /), monophthong (like / e /), and diphthong / eɪ /

  4. Language is one of the most important characteristics …; …can be considered as an exception to animal communication because they are like words; Capuchin monkeys, African drongos and topis have been found to …., which is another exception. These animals can…., just like humans

    that distinguish human beings from other animal species.; Monkey calls; lie about predator; understand what others are thinking and predict their actions

  5. Comparison between animal communication and human language:

    • i) Human language has the attribute of “displacement
    • ii) Human language has a multi-level structure of units.
    • iii) Human language is a rule-governed system of communication.
    • iv) Human language has the attribute of productivity.

  6. Human language has the attribute of “displacement- elaborate

    Sentences in language are not always about things present where the sentences are spoken or written; in contrast animal communications is about instinct and the ‘here and now’

  7. Human language has a multi-level structure of units.- elaborate

    Turn in conversation or paragraphs in writing, sentence, word, speech sounds

  8. Human language is a rule-governed system of communication.- elaborate

    The formation of words and sentences and their uses are controlled by rules

  9. Human language has the attribute of productivity- elaborate

    • It is easy for human language to add a new meaning to existing words or make up new words
    • An finite set of word and a finite set of rules make possible the production and interpretation of an infinite set of sentence

  10. Ethology is a study of …; it focus on ….. and view behavior as an ….

    Animal behavior, behavior under natural conditions; evolutionary adaptive trait

  11. Generally speaking, linguists are not interested in…, as prescribed (or stated) by language teachers and style manuals (or style guides) for writing. A prescriptive rule in English is: “…are wrong.” An example is the line “To boldly go where no man has gone before”; Another prescriptive rule is ‘not to use most/more to…’

    prescriptive rules; Split infinitives; absolute adjustives

  12. Language and chess are systems. Do they share any similarities?

    There’s finite number of chess piece and finite set of rules, but there’s infinite number of combinations of steps such that no two games have the identical sequence of moves

  13. Why is human natural language difficult for the computer?

    • Communication is based on speaking truly, but there are lies, which are difficult to process.
    • Words in human languages are usually polysemous
    • Ambiguous sentences
    • Robots cannot pick up cues and infer what people are thinking
    • the meaning of the whole idiom, may be unrelated to the meaning of its parts

  14. In what sense is bee dancing a language?

    • The orientation of the dance describe the what angle to travel fly away from the sun to find the food
    • The length of central waggle section of the dance tells the distance to the food
    • The amplitude of the dance describes the abundance of food

  15. “The right brain does better than the left in…. The left hemisphere is superior for
    pattern-matching（圖案配對）tasks, in recognizing faces, and in spatial（空間）tasks; language, temporal-order（時間順序）judgments, and arithmetic calculations, analysis, creating explanations”
  16. And the neuropsychological data from bothpatients and other focal局部disease patients suggest there’s something in thehemisphere that we call the interpreter詮釋者that performs this融會貫通that’s a crucial link for
    split-brain ; Left; integration; human consciousness
  17. Dichotic listening task or technique suggests that the left hemisphere is not superior for processing all sounds [like a cough or a laugh]; it is only better …

    for those sounds that are linguistic, such as words

  18. Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
    How the brain process language
  19. Right and left hemispheres of the brain control the …side of the body.
  20. Broca’s aphasia VS Wernicke’s aphasia

    • Broca’s: frontal part of left brain damaged; function words missing; labored speech, have difficulty understanding passive sentences
    • Wernicke’s: rear part of left brain damaged; problem with content words; fluent speech

  21. Content words VS function words

    • Content: open class; constitutes major part of a sentence
    • Function words: close class; words with little lexical meaning, serve to express the grammatical relationships with other words

  22. Syntax

    the study of sentence structure

  23. Semantics

    the study of meaning

  24. Morphology and lexicology

    the study of words

  25. Coordination

    • a means contributing to the productivity of language
    • A dependent clause means for producing new sentences in a language

  26. Sociolinguistics

    The study of language and society

  27. According to Prof. Gumperz, “….characterize our modern culturally diverse societies” and “the study of….may lead to an explanation for serious communication problems” (p. 172). People in a conversation may not recognize a cue提示 , or may ….based on the same cue. Interethnic miscommunicaitons are …

    differences in communicative style; conversational inference; make different conversational inferences, unintended

  28. English spelling defeats its purpose because

    The purpose of spelling is to tell the pronunciations but the words with the same spelling can have different pronunciations

  29. Spoken language is an identifying feature of …

    members of a national or cultural group

  30. Evaluational reactions to a spoken language should likely reflect …For example, …evaluated the …significantly more favorably than the French guises for the following 10 traits: Height, Good looks, Leadership, Intelligence, Self-confidence, Dependability, Ambition, Sociability, Character, and Likability. Another example is that The …accent was rated most favorably for intelligence followed by …

    • generalized attitudinal reactions to the group that uses it.;
    • French-speaking subjects
    • English guises
    • Yorkshire
    • RP, silence and lastly the Birmingham accent.

  31. Received pronounciation

    the standard accent of Standard English in the United Kingdom

  32. Empirical evidence is needed not only for the sciences, but also for the humanities. Even in the latter, statements should be based on…; The … is an objective quantification of the amount of bias towards a speech

    data (including videos and statistics) from observation and/or experiments; match-guise test

  33. Format for a paper reporting on an experiment

    • C i) Introduction.
    • ii) Method or experimental design.
    • iii) Results.
    • iv) Discussion.

  34. African American English omit the verb ‘…’ whenever contraction is possible; ‘John happy’ and ‘John be happy’ means …. Respectively

    To be; John is always happy; John is happy now

  35. No dialect is more expressive, more logical, more complex or more regular than any other language; all language are … and …; to say that one language is superior is a bias with no scientific basis; therefore BBC is now more tolerant to …

    Equal; productive; different accents

  36. Nonsense word are.they show the in English, ie. What English should be like Words
    that’s used only once by Wernicke patients; linguistic system
  37. American sign language is not as efficient as an …. In making new words, therefore is adopted (but ASL is as complicated as any other language)
    Oral language; finger spelling
  38. One of the most important topics in linguistics is thein general. In relation to that, linguists would like to know the answer to the question: “Will a language let its speakers express whatever new notions and ideas that they will have, from now till forever?”
    structure of human languages
  39. Only nine speech sounds in English are voiceless:

    / p t k tʃ f θ s ʃ h /

  40. 5 manners of articulation
    plosive, affricate, fricative, nasal and approximant
  41. 7 places of articulation

    bilabial, labiodental, interdental, alveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal

  42. In pure (not “applied”) study, scholars ask about the design and evolution of language. For example,
    Is it possible for animal communication to have the attribute of displacement?

    Language and chess are systems. Do they share any similarities?

    Why is human natural language difficult for the computer?

    There is a signing space for sign languages. It can be compared with the oral cavity, from where speech sounds in oral languages are made
  43. Softbank claim that Pepper can …But criticism for Pepper include The conversations are…
    read your emotions and have a conversation with you, very one-sided, and it asks a lot of questions
  44. ELIZA, which is., was designed by the MIT scientist1923-2008) in the 1960s.
    a computer program serving as a psychiatrist, Joseph Weizenbaum
  45. Physically實質上 (i.e., in terms of physics and biology), the brain cells are damaged in aphasias. Conceptually (i.e., in analytic discussions), aphasias can also be considered as ..., which underlies the actual behavior of speaking, reading and understanding.
    damage to the linguistic system
  46. Sign languages are not rudimentary languages. Evidence:

    “Deaf signers with damage to the left hemisphere show aphasia for sign language similar to the language breakdown in hearing aphasics”

  47. One of the topics in “conversational analysis” is on“…”

    the cues and inferential mechanisms involved

  48. Sign languages are not rudimentary languages. Argument:
    “Like all languages, ASL [American Sign Language] has its own grammar with phonological, morphological, syntactic , and semantic rules, and a mental lexicon of signs
Card Set
HUMA 1010 midterm
HUMA 1010 midterm