UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGÓGICA NACIONAL “FRANCISCO MORAZÁN”

FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES
CARRERA DE PROFESORADO EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS
DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS

READING: answer the following questions in pairs.

Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NwMAEA2o4fhFlPgIE9PxWpYqwZjUhOLT?usp=sharing

Instructions:
1. Read the chapters 2 -6.
2. Complete the study guide questions.
3. After reading, get at least 15 concepts related to the field of psycholinguistics.
STUDY QUESTIONS:

CHAPTER 2: The Nature of Linguistic Competence (5%)

1. What is meant by the claim that human language is universal? Why is this claim a critical
issue in psycholinguistics?
2. What is the difference between an allophone and a phoneme? Do all languages have the
same sets of phonemes and allophones?
3. What are phonotactic constraints? How are they related to syllable structure?
4. How do phonological rules relate to the way words are pronounced?
5. What are some ways prosody is used to determine sentence meaning?
6. What is the distinction between bound and free morphemes? What are morphophonological
rules?
7. Distinguish between derivational and inflectional morphemes. What are some examples of
each?
8. What are the three major operations described by the syntactic component?
9. What does it mean to say that the constituents of a sentence are hierarchically organized?
10. What does it mean to say that syntactic rules are structure dependent? What would a
language be like if it didn’t have structure dependent rules? Are there any such human
languages?
11. What is meant by the statement that the rules of grammar are psychologically real? How do
metalinguistic abilities suggest that this is true?
12. What information is included in the lexicon? What kind of information is not included?

CHAPTER 3: The Biological Basis of Language (5%)

1. When psycholinguists say language is biologically based, do they mean that language has
no social or cultural basis?
2. How does the universality of language support the view that language is biologically based?

Psycholinguistics
Mrs. Meholy Euceda
II PAC 2022
 UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGÓGICA NACIONAL “FRANCISCO MORAZÁN”
FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES
CARRERA DE PROFESORADO EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS
DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS
3. If a child has normal hearing but fails to acquire language, the child is judged to have a
pathological condition. Explain the reasoning behind such a diagnosis, referring to the
biological basis of language.
4. What is meant by the lateralization of language? How does the study of aphasia support the
view that language is lateralized?
5. How do studies of brain mapping demonstrate not only the lateralization of language but
also the localization of language function in particular areas of the brain?
6. Why is a person with a “split brain” unable to name an object held in his left hand
(assuming his eyes are closed)?
9. What is the right-ear advantage for speech? How do psycholinguists know that it is not
simply a result of a general auditory superiority of the right ear?
7. What is the main difference between an N400 and a P600 ERP component? How does the
existence of different ERP responses for different types of ungrammaticalities help
demonstrate that language is biological?
8. How do studies of inherited language disorders contribute to the pursuit of the genetic
underpinnings for language?
9. When language is compared to writing systems, it appears that the former flows from
human biology, while the other is a product of human culture. What distinctions between
language and writing lead to this conclusion?

CHAPTER 4: The acquisition of Language (5%)

1. What is the nativist claim about the nature of biologically based components in language
acquisition?
2. How does Universal Grammar assist the child in acquiring language? How about
acquisition principles?
3. What characteristics of the child’s linguistic environment are important for language
acquisition? What aspects are not important? What evidence exists to support this?
4. Describe how children approach the task of acquiring the phonemic inventory for their
language. How is this process a metaphor for all of language acquisition?
5. Do bilingual language acquirers differentiate the phonemic inventories for each of their
languages? Do they show syntactic differentiation, when the syntax differs between their
two languages?
6. What are some of the principles of lexical learning that assist the child in acquiring a large
lexicon very rapidly? Explain both what they are and how they are useful to the word-
learning child.
7. There are individual differences in language acquisition among children learning the same
language, as well as among children acquiring different languages. What kinds of variation
would one expect to observe? What kinds of variation would one not expect to observe?
8. In general, what kinds of morphemes are acquired at an early age? What kinds are acquired
at a later age?
9. How do metalinguistic abilities develop in the child? Why are they considered to be
particularly important?

CHAPTER 5: The speaker: producing speech (5%)

Psycholinguistics
Mrs. Meholy Euceda
II PAC 2022
 UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGÓGICA NACIONAL “FRANCISCO MORAZÁN”
FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES
CARRERA DE PROFESORADO EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS
DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS
1. How can the study of speech errors demonstrate that speech consists of segmented words
and phonemes before it is produced? Why is this interesting?
2. What are some of the similarities and differences between monolingual and bilingual
models of production?
3. How does the study of speech errors demonstrate that speech is represented at various
processing levels before it is produced?
4. What characteristics of speech errors demonstrate that they are not random, but honor
linguistic classifications and constraints?
5. At some point before an utterance is produced it is represented in a form to which
phonological and morphophonological rules have not yet applied. What characteristics of
speech errors support this claim?
6. Freud suggested that word retrieval errors were a result of repressed feelings. Consider the
following spoonerism: Work is the curse of the drinking classes. What is the
psycholinguistic view of this error?
7. How do studies of syntactic priming demonstrate that speakers and hearers align their
utterances interactively in conversations?
8. In the source–filter model of vowel production, what is the source? What is the filter? How
do the source and filter operate together?
9. What are the primary acoustic characteristics of different classes of consonants? How is the
acoustic signal related to articulation?
10. What is coarticulation? Why is it such an important feature of speech production?
11. Why do psycholinguists say that the speech signal is continuous? Are mental
representations of sentences, before they are produced, also continuous? What is the
evidence for this?

CHAPTER 6: Speech Perception and Lexical Access (5%)

1. Why is coarticulation so important for speech perception?
2. When comparing the syllables [di], [da], and [du], what is meant by the statement that the
initial consonant [d] exists in the speaker/hearer’s mind but not in the physical speech
signal?
3. What are the sources of variability in speech? How does speech perception overcome
acoustic variability to create a mental percept?
4. Explain categorical perception, making reference to Figure 6.
How does the hearer’s linguistic competence influence his perceptual categories?
5. What does it mean to say the perceptual system is constructive? How do phonological
illusions support this claim?
6. What are some ways that speech perception in a second language differs from speech
perception in the native language of a monolingual?
7. What are some of the differences between languages in the way that suprasegmental
information is used during speech perception?
8. What is the role of phonology during reading? What is the role of orthography? Do these
two systems operate independently?
9. What is the difference between bottom-up and top-down processing? When do
psycholinguists think that top-down processing is used by the hearer? Is this a conscious
decision on the part of the hearer?
Psycholinguistics
Mrs. Meholy Euceda
II PAC 2022
 UNIVERSIDAD PEDAGÓGICA NACIONAL “FRANCISCO MORAZÁN”
FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES
CARRERA DE PROFESORADO EN LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS
DEPARTAMENTO DE LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS
10. How does the frequency and ambiguity of lexical items affect subjects’ performance on a
lexical decision task? Do these variables have the same effect when words are processed in
sentences?
11. What are “garden path” sentences? Why are they of interest to psycholinguists?

Psycholinguistics
Mrs. Meholy Euceda
II PAC 2022