Study guide Exam I
Psyc 309
Fall 2002
1. What was the behaviorist approach to language? How did it explain the acquisition of words and sentences? What problems are there with this approach?
2. How did Chomsky's approach differ from that of the behaviorists? What influence did Chomsky have on the development of psychological theories of language? What is Chomsky’s position on innateness? What is universal grammar?
3. What are phrase structure rules, transformations? What was the derivational theory of complexity? What problems did this theory have?
4. What is the connection ist approach to cognitive processing? Give an example.
5. What are phonemes? distinctive features? What do the phonemes /b/ and /p/ have in common? /b/ and /d/ ? How are distinctive features and phonemes identified from the acoustic signal? What are trading relations?
6. What is coarticulation? What is the "lack of invariance" problem? What theories of speech perception have been offered to deal with the lack of invariance problem?
7. What is categorical perception? What experimental procedures have been used to demonstrate categorical perception? Does categorical perception imply a specialized mode of perception that is unique to speech?
8. What procedures have been used to study speech perception in infants? What has been found with regard to categorical perception? What do these results suggest about the development of speech perception?
9. What difficulties arise in trying to separate the speech stream into words? Where do the breaks in the speech stream tend to come?
10. Describe the evidence that young infants can pick up on repeated patterns of sounds in speech. How does this relate to the development of word segmentation?
11. What is prosody? How might prosody play a role in identifying word boundaries?
12. What is lexical ambiguity? Are all meanings of an ambiguous word accessed? Only one consistent with the context?
13. What was the nature of the speech perception deficit for Derek? What did his pattern suggest about the processes involved in auditory and written word recognition?
14. What is cognitive neuropsychology? How can the evidence from brain-damaged individuals inform us about the operation of the normal language system? What is meant by "modularity"? Be able to give an example.
15. What are associations and dissociations in cognitive function? Which provides the strongest evidence regarding the nature of the cognitive system?
16. What criticisms have been raised about cognitive neuropsychology? How can these be countered?
17. What is top-down processing in speech perception? Describe phenomena indicating that top-down processing plays a role in speech perception at the lexical, semantic and syntactic levels. How do the cohort and trace models of speech perception allow for an influence of top-down processing?
18. Describe the McGurk effect. What does this indicate about the nature of speech perception?
19. What is the case study methodology in neuropsychology? Why do researchers in neuropsychology favor this approach over the more usual group study methodology?
20. Describe some different orthographic systems. What is meant by deep vs. shallow orthography?
21. What is tachistoscopic presentation? Why has this method been used in studying word reading? What is the word superiority effect (WSE)? How has it been demonstrated? What is the advantage of the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm in demonstrating the WSE?
22. Describe the dual route model of oral word reading. How does this account for the frequency by regularity interaction in word reading? What is the connectionist model of word reading? Can it account for this finding?
23. What is acquired dyslexia? What are surface and phonological? How can models of word reading account for these disorders?
24. What is deep dyslexia? What does this indicate about how word reading might proceed?
25. Does the phonological code for a word have to be accessed in order to get to its meaning?
26. Describe the typical pattern of eye movements in reading. Describe the characteristics of the perceptual span in reading. How far in the periphery is word information identified?