Optional Problem Set

If (and only if) this problem set is turned in before you begin midterm #2, we will drop your lowest problem set score and replace it with a grade of 30/30. Please bring your answers to this problem set to class on Friday June 6, 2008, and don’t forget to include your name, your ID number, your TA’s name, and the day your section meets.

1. Is human reasoning rational? Discuss decision making, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and/or analogical reasoning. (Pick one and discuss in detail, or pick a few.)

2.

(a) What conceptual metaphor is used in all 4 of the following sentences?

i. You’re wasting my time.

ii. I don’t have the time to give you.

iii. How do you spend your time these days?

iv. I’ve invested a lot of time in this project?

For sentences i – iv, take the verb and describe what it means first (b) in the source domain, and (c) then in the target domain.

3. According to the motor theory of speech perception, the perception of speech is an innate, species-specific (human) ability.

(a) What aspect of the motor theory motivates the claim that speech perception is uniquely human?

(b) Describe an experiment that tested whether speech perception is innate. What did the results suggest?

(c) Describe an experiment that tested whether speech perception is species specific. What did the results suggest?

4. Word exchange errors typically involve two words from the same syntactic category, and from different phrases in the same clause. While they sometimes sound alike, they often do not.

(a) Give an example of a characteristic word exchange error (put the target utterance afterwards in parentheses).

(b) On Garrett’s model, what level do word exchange levels occur at?

(c) Briefly explain what kind of linguistic information is available at this level of processing (the correct answer to b), and what information is not yet available.

(d) How do sound exchange errors differ from word exchange errors?

(e) How does Dell’s model explain word exchange errors?

5. A woman who had been blind since birth – and a proficient Braille reader -- suffered a stroke that left her able to understand and produce spoken language, but unable to read Braille.

(a) What is this deficit called?

(b) Damage to which area(s) of the brain is typically associated with this deficit?

(c) As a result of her stroke, this patient had bilateral damage to primary visual cortex, but intact somatosensory cortex (and an intact ability to make non-linguistic somatosensory discriminations). Other research shows that, at least in some blind people, reading Braille is associated with activation in visual cortex; and that temporarily disabling primary visual cortex with repetitive trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, impairs Braille reading. What do these data suggest about the role of visual cortex in reading Braille in the blind?