Quiz created: 2021-08-29

Review Quiz (Part III: Phonemes)

Instructions: Answer the multiple choice questions, guessing if necessary; then click on the "Process Questions" button at the end of the quiz to see your score in the adjacent message box. The program will not reveal which questions you got wrong, only how many points you have. Go back and change your answers until you get them all right. (The message box will rejoice at that point and the page will change color to show it is tickled pink.)

Points to note: (1) Questions with only one possible answer are one point each. (2) Questions with one or more possible answers (represented by check boxes) give a point for each correct answer, but also subtract a point for each wrong answer! (3) The program will not attempt to score your efforts at all if you have not tried at least half of the questions. (4) This quiz is for your own use only. No record of your progress is kept or reported to anyone.

1. In order to distinguish phonemes from other representations of language, linguists use slanted lines (for example /bet/) to show that the enclosed symbols represent
phonemes 
the International Phonetic Alphabet 
phonetic, rather than phonemic, sounds 
the traditional spelling of a word 
a word that does not occur in a given text or corpus of texts 
No Answer
2. The exact sound of a phoneme doesn’t make much difference; what matters is that it must
contrast with other phonemes in the same language 
be closely similar to all its allophones 
be easy to distinguish from sounds made by non-human animals 
be easily represented with familiar written symbols 
No Answer
3. In a “fricative” sound, the flow of air
is stopped by the epiglottis 
is accompanied by vibration of the vocal chords 
goes only through the nasal cavity 
is affected by friction as it passes one or more parts of the speech tract. 
No Answer
4. People like to say that English has 5 vowels (a, e,i ,o, and u), but that refers to printed letters. The number of vowel phonemes in English varies somewhat by dialect, but Chicago English seems to have roughly
5  7  18  35  50  75  No Answer
5. The concept of “minimal pair” is useful to show that
two phonemes are different 
two allophones belong to the same phoneme 
two languages are cognate 
two words are synonyms. 
No Answer
6. The International Phonetic Alphabet was devised
in the 1800s, before the “discovery” of phonemes 
to assist in computer input of multilingual text materials 
because it was difficult to represent Chinese tones in the Latin alphabet 
by a typewriter manufacturer in hopes of selling a very expensive “expanded” machine to libraries and schools 
by the International Bureau of Standards at the request of several African states 
to provide a convenient writing system for indigenous peoples wanting to be able to type their own languages 
No Answer
7. As the terms “etic” and “emic” are borrowed into anthropology, a comparative study of corporal punishment of children by their parents in twenty unrelated ethnic groups would be called
emic  etic  No Answer
8. According to the essay, what appears random and/or irrelevant at one level of language analysis may be meaningfully patterned at another. For example,
Russian distinguishes palatalized and unpalatalized stops, whereas English does not 
Chinese has minimal pairs distinguished by tone 
shouting may indicate rage without changing the content of the message 
shouting may overcome background noise 
No Answer
9. Just as many anthropologists extend “emics” and “etics” beyond language, the idea underlying the ugly word “subphonemicism” is extended in this essay beyond language into a discussion of academic gowns, in which the number of pleats shows
the level of the degree 
the field of study 
that an academic gown is not a wedding gown or a hospital gown 
how much money the graduate has paid to buy or rent the gown 
No Answer

      Points out of 9:


Awesomeness
Score
Awesomeness Score: The following awesomeness score is a measure of how much guessing you did to get all items right. It is 100 if you got all questions right when you clicked the process button for the first time. It gets proportionately lower if it took more clicks, until it hits 0 if your clicks exceeded the number of questions.



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This consummately cool, pedagogically compelling, self-correcting,
multiple-choice quiz was produced automatically from
a simple text file of questions using D.K. Jordan's
dubiously original, but publicly accessible
Think Again Quiz Maker
of April 9, 2021.