Psychology of Language - Chapter 5-8 Question Bank

In Kintsch’s Construction-Integration theory, which mental representation is built from a set of
propositions?

d. text base

Which of the following describes the order in which Kintsch’s Construction-Integration system builds
mental representations?

c. surface form --> situation model --> text base

According to Kintsch's Construction-Integration theory, which representation captures the
overarching ideas and events of the text, completely separate from the words in the text?

b. situation model

In Kintsch’s Construction-Integration theory, which mental representation is the strongest and longest lasting?

c. situation model

People read the first word in a sentence slower than words that follow. People read the first
paragraph of a story slower than other paragraphs in the same story. According to the structure-
building framework, what mental process is most responsible for these effects?

c. laying a foundation

In the Structure-Building framework, what happens after comprehenders shift and start building a
new substructure?

d. information from before the shift becomes less accessible

In the structure-building framework, _______________ occurs when incoming information is highly
related to the part of the text that is currently being processed. _______________ occurs when
incoming information does not closely relate to the material currently being processed.

c. mapping, shifting

When someone reads the sentence, "Bob walked to the store and bought a sandwich," they assume
that the act of walking to the store took place before the act of buying a sandwich. This kind of
assumption goes by the name __________________________.

c. temporal iconicity

According to the event-indexing model, what is the purpose of the discourse comprehension system?

d. to understand the goals and actions of protagonists and events that unfold in the real world or some fictional world

According to the event-indexing model, what core aspects of stories do comprehenders track while
reading a story?

a. time, causation, protagonists, space, and motivation

According to the principle of temporal iconicity, which of the following sentences should be the most
difficult to process?

b. Kristen graduated from college after she got her first job.

You are told a story that does NOT conform to the typical story grammar of stories in your culture.
What will happen to your memory of the story?

a. you will remember the story as fitting the typical story structure in your culture

A structured, pre-existing package of knowledge related to a particular domain is called a(n)

b. schema

Consider the sentence “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?”.
According to the structure-mapping and focus theory, why should comprehenders sometimes fail to
notice a strange word in a story, like saying “Moses” instead of “Noah”?

d. the situation model "overwhelms" the meaning of the word that is stored in the lexicon

According to the minimal inference hypothesis, when do readers make inferences when
comprehending a story?

d. a and b

Consider the words "cowboy" and "gangster." What is true about the senses and referents of these
two words?

d. they have different senses, and cannot refer to the same thing

Another name for "referring expression" is

a. anaphor

Which of the following statements accurately describes word meanings?

b. two words can have different senses and refer to different things

The _____________________ of a discourse is the discourse's topic, the most important thing,
and/or the most salient element of the discourse at a specific moment in time.

c. focus

Which entity in a sentence is typically the most prominent or salient in a comprehender's mental
representation of the sentence?

b. the first one

Which statement is true about discourse focus?

c. it is easier to establish co-reference between an anaphor and a focused antecedent

Why is it easier for listeners when anaphors refer back to typical antecedents (e.g., "sparrow") than
when anaphors refer back to unusual or atypical referents (e.g., "ostrich")?

d. typical antecedents serve as better memory retrieval cues because they share more features with the category prototype

When do speakers use unheralded pronouns?

d. a and b

Which of the following kind of anaphor is most explicit?

b. proper name

What happens when a speaker uses an explicit anaphor in a context where a less explicit anaphor
would successfully pick out an antecedent?

a. nothing

According to the memory focus model, those discourse entities that are active in working memory
and are immediately available to be referred to are said to be in _________________.

b. explicit focus

According to the memory focus model, the stages of anaphoric reference include

d. bonding and binding

According to centering theory, which part of a sentence provides the means of connecting the
current expression with previous expressions?

d. the forward looking anaphor

According to centering theory, which type of sentence should be easiest to process?

b. one where the backward looking center refers to the most prominent forward looking center from the previous sentence

According to the informational load hypothesis (ILH), which of the following antecedent-anaphor
sequences will be most difficult to process?

c. the bird -- the robin

According to the standard pragmatic view, how do listeners interpret non-literal expressions?

c. they start by computing the literal meaning

According to the standard pragmatic view, when do listeners consider a non-literal meaning?

b. any time the literal meaning does not make sense

What are the two main components of a metaphoric expression?

a. topic and vehicle

In the expression, "Lorne is a dynamo," what is the vehicle?

c. dynamo

According to the comparison hypothesis, how are metaphoric expressions interpreted?

c. they are mentally converted to similes and then interpreted

How does the conceptual mapping hypothesis differ from the standard pragmatic view?

a. the conceptual mapping hypothesis says there is very little difference between literal and non-literal language

According to the salience imbalance hypothesis, which of the following plays the biggest role in the
choice of a vehicle?

c. the grounds of comparison should be a salient property of the vehicle

Children understand concepts like anger long before they have working knowledge of fluid
dynamics. This state of affairs is a problem for which of the following?

b. conceptual mapping

How does the career of metaphor hypothesis differ from the class inclusion and dual reference
hypothesis?

d. a and b

Why do people use metaphoric expressions?

d. b and c

magine if someone said, "I spent the weekend studying Lincoln." Which of the words in that
sentence is a metonym?

d. Lincoln

Which of the following expressions includes a metonym?

b. My brother read Shakespeare in college.

What kind of idiom is spill the beans?

d. a decomposable idiom

What kind of idiom is syntactically flexible?

a. decomposable idioms

What is one way that decomposable idioms differ from non-decomposable idioms?

b. decomposable idioms are more lexically flexible than non-decomposable idioms

In conversation, the words that people speak are part of the

a. main channel

Which principle is at the highest level in Grice's hierarchy?

d. cooperation

Which Gricean principle says, "Make your contribution as informative as is required"?

d. quality

Which Gricean principle says, "Try to make your contribution one that is true"?

b. quality

What might be wrong with Grice's theory of conversation?

c. Grice's theory describes ideal, rather than real conversations

In what way(s) do real dialogues violate Gricean maxims?

a. speakers routinely fail to communicate effectively with listeners in face-to-face exchanges

AND

b. speakers ignore their listeners' needs when formulating and delivering utterances

What's the difference between common knowledge and common ground?

a. common ground is shared, and acknowledged as shared, by speakers and listeners

What effect does establishing common ground have on a conversation?

b. it leads to referring expressions getting shorter and shorter as a conversation progresses

What principle of conversation says, "speakers will produce whatever is easiest for them to
produce, even when what is easy for speakers to say may be more difficult to listeners to understand"?

c. availability

Which hypothesis proposes that speakers use special care to adapt what they say to meet the
listener's specific needs?

d. audience design

Why might speakers not engage in audience design?

d. b and c

Information that only the speaker knows is called __________ ground.

b. privileged

What kinds of objects will listeners consider as possible referents when interpreting a speaker's
statements?

c. objects in that are in common ground, and objects that are in the listener's privileged ground

What happened in the "tape in a bag" experiment?

a. listeners interpreted speakers' expressions as referring to objects that were in the listeners’ privileged ground

According to the egocentric hypothesis, what determines the form a speaker's utterances will take
in a conversation?

c. the principle of availability