The exam will be cumulative.  However, the emphasis will be on our more recent class material–roughly, our course topics from November and December.  These include:

1. Spoken Language Comprehension
2. Spoken Language Production
3. Language & The Brain
4. Human Languages vs. Animal Communication Systems:  Bees, Wild Primates, Ape Language Studies
5. The Evolution of the Human Language Faculty & The Protolanguage Hypothesis
6. The Relationship Between Language & Thought (The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

From amongst the above topics, the heaviest emphasis will be placed on those that have been introduced since our last quiz, i.e. the last three topics on the above list.

You can also expect a question or two that address our earlier course topics from September and October (roughly, “What Constitutes Knowledge of Language?”, “Nativism, The Poverty of the Stimulus & Universal Grammar”, and “Language Development in Normal & Unusual Circumstances”).  These questions will be of a very general nature, and will address material that has remained relevant throughout the rest of the course, insofar as it served as a backdrop for our subsequent discussions.  Certainly, there will be no questions that address very specific facts or conclusions that were introduced during those earlier portions of our course.

Note:  I will have my regularly scheduled office hours on the following days:  Tuesday, December 11, from 4-6pm; Friday, December 14, from 12-1pm; and Tuesday, December 18, from 4-6pm.

Note:  Extra copies of all the class handouts can be found in the mailbox outside of my office door (621 Commonwealth Avenue, #110).

The quiz will cover the following topics, which we have encountered in class and in our readings:

Spoken Language Comprehension & Production:

• overview of the stages, general features of sentence comprehension
• lexical access and modularity vs. interactivity in sentence comprehension
• “garden path” sentences and strategies for incremental syntactic parsing (Late Closure, Minimal Attachment)
• “slips of the tongue” in sentence production

Language & the Brain:

• evidence that our language abilities (typically) reside in the left hemisphere
• characteristic features of different language aphasias:  speech disturbances, affected region of brain, etc.
• Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, and their possible functions

Note:  Extra copies of all the class handouts can be found in the mailbox outside of my office door (621 Commonwealth Avenue, #110).