6. Damage to Broca’s area produces speech that is hesitant, effortful, and grammatically simple. The main idea is that their ability to produce language is impaired, although there may be some impairment with understanding language as well. Damage to Wernicke’s area (towards the back of the brain) typically produces serious difficulties in understanding speech. People with Wernicke’s aphasia tend to have very wordy, verbose speech but with little semantic coherence. It has been shown that people with speech disorders typically have more damage to the brain on the left side. “Lateralization of language” meaning each hemisphere of the brain has different functions, and language tends to be dominated by the left side.

Who wants to let Joel get them pregnant?

7. Chomsky argues that much of language is innate. Evidence of this includes that 1) no one is formally taught language and you can’t prevent a child from learning it; 2) children are not simply imitating their parents – they can produce new sentences; 3) very young children who have a very small spoken vocabulary still understand word order and syntax

8. According to the constructionist view of inferences, readers usually draw inferences about the causes of events and the relationships between events. It is “constructionist” because readers actively construct explanations as they integrated the current information with all the relevant information from the previous parts of the text. Evidence for this theory comes from a study where subjects are asked to read several statements. The statements relate semantically and seem to tell a story, but in the inconsistent condition, one of the statements is inconsistent with what would be expected given a previous statement. In this 2×2 design, there is also a “near” condition, where the statements are adjacent to one another, and a “far” condition, where the two statements are separated by other statements. The reaction time is significantly slower for the inconsistent condition across both the near and far conditions. This shows that readers try to connect the material within a text passage, and they consult information stored in long-term memory. During this processing, we try to construct a representation of the text that is internally consistent, even when irrelevant material intervenes.

9. Slips-of-the-tongue are errors in which sounds or entire words are rearranged between two or more different words. One such error is a sound error, which occur when sounds in nearby words are exchanged. For example, this could be snow flurries à flow snurries, doctor pepper à poctor depper, or red brick à bred rick. Another type of error is a morpheme error, which occurs when morphemes (the smallest meaningful unit of language, such as –ly or in-) are exchanged in nearby words. For example, this would be self-destruct instruction à self-instruct destruction. Word errors occur when words are exchanged. For example, “Sending a letter to my mother” would be “Sending a mother to my letter.”

10. What is the relationship between age and language acquisition? According to the critical period hypothesis, our ability, to acquire a second language is strictly limited to a specific period. In fact, by early puberty, we are likely no longer able to acquire a new language with native-like fluency. However, studies have found no abrupt drop in the ability to acquire language as age increases. In terms of phonology, people who acquire a second language during childhood are more likely to pronounce words like a native speaker of that language. In terms of vocabulary, the age of acquisition does not seem to be related to language skills. The controversy about age of acquisition is strongest when considering grammar. For subjects who are natively Korean, when we control for the number of years of education in the U.S., age of acquisition is not related to the individual’s mastery of English grammar.