EXERCISES FOR WEEK 12: INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

Name : Sari Khairunnisa

NIM : 21018034

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Review of terms and concepts: language acquisition

1. Inside the human brain is the r-complex, which is like the brains of reptiles and birds; in it resides
our basic drives and instincts.

2. Wrapped around the answer to number 1 is the limbic system or the mammalian brain, which
affects animal calls. Inhumans, it is the source of screaming and crying.

3. The neocrtex is where the language skills reside. This is the area of the brain that contains the
Broca’s area and the Wernicke’s area.

4. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Eric Lenneberg believe that the potential for language is
innate to humans.

5. This is known as the innateness hypothesis.

6. Examples of biologically based behaviors include sucking, eating, grasping objects, walking and
talking.

7. Cooking, sewing, carpentry, bike riding, reading, and writing require training and instruction; they
are not biologically based.

8. The innateness hypothesis proposes that children are predisposed to a certain universal grammar
or UG.

9. The hardwiring in the brains of children, which allows them to learn language, has been called a
language acquisition device or LAD.

10. The critical period hypothesis states that after the age of puberty the language acquisition
device ceases to function.

11. The imitation hypothesis does not account for the ability of children to learn language when
there is a poverty of stimulus.

12. The reinforcement hypothesis postulates that children learn language by positive reinforcement
when they produce a grammaticalutterance and by being corrected when they don’t.

13. The Interactionalist hypothesis (also known as constructivism) states that children use their
innate language abilities to extractthe rules of the language from their environment and
construct the phonology, semantics, and syntax of their native language.

14. Within a few months of birth, babies begin making verbal sounds, first cooing then babling.

15. One-word utterances are referred to as holophrases because they are complete or undivided
phrases this stage of language acquisition is the holophrastic stage.

16. Longer utterances are described as telegraphic speech because they resemble telegrams in
which function words are deleted.

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17. With the innate drive to identify patterns and apply them as rules, children overgeneralize the
rules and apply them to all of the words.

18. Productive vocabulary consists of the words a person is able to use; receptive vocabulary
consists of understandable words.

19. Children assume that an identifying word applies to the whole object not to its parts or
attributes.

20. When children begin the process of refining their understanding of words, first they extend the
meaning of words they knowto things that have similar properties. This is called over extension.

21. Children who call all men they know Daddy are “wrong” in English,but might be “right” if they
were learning a language in which all male relatives were called by the same kinship term or
they are learning a different language.

22. As children learn that their broad categories have to be narrowed down and they acquire a larger
vocabulary, they go through a phase of underextension.

23. When people use the word monkey to refer to apes and prosimians, they are overextending or
overgeneralizing.

24. Pronouns are problematic for children because their meaning shifts depending on who is
speakingand who is addressed.

25. Simultaneous bilingualism is when two languages are learned at the same time or a child
acquires two or more languages.

26. When children learn a second or third language after entering kindergarten, it is referred to as
sequential bilingualism.

27. The unitary system hypothesis proposes that bilingual children learn the two languages at first as
one lexicon and one set of semantic rules for both languages.

28. The separate systems hypothesis proposes that, from the very beginning, bilingual children learn
the two languages by constructing different phonological systems, lexicons, and semantic
systems.

29. The concept of “two monolinguals in one head” refers to the fact that bilingual children make
mistakes that correspond to the mistakes of monolingual children in each language.

30. Learning a language after the age of puberty is an intellectual process, involving pronounciation
practice, grammar exercises, and vocabulary memorization.

31. The first-language phonological system often interferes with learning the second language.

32. The accent of second-language speakers is the result of the fossilization of the first-language
characteristics in the second language.