Linguists focus on 2 aspects of language: productivity and regularity.  What do each of these terms refer to, and how does the regularity of language relate to its productivity?
What is a syntactic anomaly? What is a semantic anomaly?
What are two things that grammars are supposed to explain? (Hint: it has to do with sentences which are in the language and utterances which are not).
What's the difference between competence and performance (according to Chomsky)?
What's the difference between a phoneme and a morpheme? How many phonemes does 'decriminalize' have? How many morphemes does 'decriminalize' have?
What is a distinctive feature?
Why do phonologists care about distinctive features? (That is, how do phonologists use distinctive features?)
What advantage does using a pluralization rule have over merely memorizing the plurals for all the words you need to know?
*On a formal approach to language, how are the encoding and decoding perspectives related to one another?
*Can you distinguish between the terminal and the nonterminal elements in a grammar?
*If given a grammar and a particular string, can you decide whether or not that string caan be generated by that grammar?
*Given a simple grammar and a particular string, can you draw a tree that shows how that particular string can be generated from the grammar? For example:

S->ab
S->aSb
Draw a tree for the string 'aaabbb'

What is an automaton? Is a Turing machine an automaton?
Could a Turing machine recognize a finite state grammar?
*Could a finite state machine recognize a context-free grammar?
What is the Chomskian Hierarchy and why is it an important development in cognitive science?
What is semantics?
What are the 4 conversational maxims?
*Given an example of a violation of a maxim, can you name what maxim was apparently violated and justify your answer?
What is a conversational implicature?
What do the maxims have to do with conversational implicature?
What is common ground? What are some different ways that entities can enter common ground?
*Can you recognize speech acts which are: representatives, directives, commisives, expressives, and declarations?
*What properties of the normal speech signal make speech perception hard?
Name one fact that argues for the motor theory of speech perception?
What tenet of the motor theory of speech perception is the least tenable? Why?
What is categorical perception?
What 2 features of Marslen-Wilson and Tyler's speech recognition model are not consistent with a serial approach to speech recognition?
*How do you think that Marslen-Wilson and Tyler would explain the phonemic restoration effect?
*What is the McGurk effect? Using ideas from the interactive activation model by McClelland and Rumelhart, how would you model the McGurk effect?
What is a syntactic ambiguity?
What is a garden path sentence?
What is a parsing heuristic?
*What is the minimal attachment strategy? How would the minimal attachment strategy operate in parsing the sentence 'The spy saw the cop with binoculars'? Can you tell the difference between a tree that represents a "high" attachment for "The spy saw the cop with binoculars" and a "low" attachment for "The spy saw the cop with binoculars"?
How does verbatim memory for text differ from gist memory for text?
Describe one experimental finding that suggests the clause is a fundamental unit in language processing.
What are the 4 levels in Garrett's model of speech production? What happens at each of those levels?
What is the tip of the tongue phenomenon? What's the significance of this phenomenon?
What are the 4 levels in Dell's model of speech production? Which of Dell's levels corresponds best to Garrett's functional level?  Which 2 of Dell's levels corresponds best to Garrett's positional level?
What's a spoonerism? a word exchange error? a morpheme exchange error? an anticipation error?
*On Garrett's model, why do morpheme exchange errors occur?
*On Dell's model, why do anticipation errors occur? why do word exchange errors occur? why do morpheme exchange errors occur?
What did John B. Watson (father of behaviorism) believe about the relationship between language and thought?
How did Smith, Brown, Toman, and Goodman disprove Watson's idea about the relationship between language and thought?
What is linguistic relativity? linguistic determinism?
What was Whorf's view of the relationship between language and thought? How do empirical data bear on the strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis?
*What do Berlin and Kay suggest about the basic color terms in languages across the world? That is, do their cross-linguistic data suggest that the vocabulary for basic color terms is variable or systematic in character? Explain.
How does moderate Whorfianism differ from stronger versions of the Whorfian hypothesis?