ENG511 Midterm Past Papers 2025 by Nimma Malik

What is proposition? IMP

A proposition is an idea unit; it is a statement that expresses a factual claim; it is the basic unit involved in the understanding and retention of text. Propositions correspond roughly to verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and subordinating conjunctions (not nouns or pronouns). Proposition density is an important factor in reading comprehension because of a proposition’s role in text comprehension and retention.

define Prelinguistic Communication?

Prelinguistic communication refers to the ways infants communicate before they acquire spoken language. It includes all the intentional and unintentional behaviors that infants use to express needs, emotions, and interests—without using actual words. These advances take place in the first year of life, suggesting that infants’ understanding of communication precedes and facilitates much of the child’s acquisition of phonology, syntax, and semantics.

Explain Features level. OR level of written language processing? IMP

Written language is processed at three levels:

1. feature level
2. letter level
3. word level

At the feature level, the stimulus is represented in terms of the physical features that comprise a letter of the alphabet. For instance, the letter K may be represented as a vertical line and two diagonal lines; R may be coded as a vertical line, a diagonal line, and a curved portion; and so on.

At the letter level, the visual stimulus is represented more abstractly as an identity separate from its physical manifestation. That is, a stimulus may be represented as an F regardless of whether it is typewritten or handwritten.

Finally, there is a word level of processing, in which an array of features and letters is recognized as a familiar word. As the word is recognized, various properties of the word, such as its spelling, pronunciation, meaning, become available to us.

4 uses and areas of language knowledge?

Uses of language knowledge refer to how our understanding of language (its structure, meaning, and use) helps us in various real-world contexts.

1. Communication
2. Comprehension
3. Social Interaction
4. Academic Success
5. Cultural Understanding
6. Professional Use
7. Critical Thinking

Four broad areas of language knowledge may be distinguished.

1. Semantics deals with the meanings of sentences and words.
2. Syntax involves the grammatical arrangement of words within the sentence.
3. Phonology concerns the system of sounds in a language.
4. Pragmatics entails the social rules involved in language use. It is not ordinarily productive to ask people explicitly what they know about these aspects of language. We infer linguistic knowledge from observable behavior.

Constraint Based Model?

Constraint-based theories of language comprehension emphasize how people make use of the vast amount of probabilistic information available in the linguistic signal.

❖ Sentence processing involves immediate incorporation of all available information in creation of the final output. ❖ All relevant information is available immediately to the parser during reading and listening. ❖ Activated constraints are in competition with one another and when two constraints are equally activated ambiguity arise. ❖ Constraint based theory that argues several constraints are activated before the output is chosen. ❖ Constraint based theory, processing difficulty only arises when two or more constraints have approximately equal activation resulting in competition.

In conclusion, the constraint-based theory argues all possible interpretations of sentences are activated with the most appropriate being selected, arguing the absence of reanalysis; again, this is in contrast to the garden path model.

Explain in detail Gender Differences in Conversation? IMp

Gender differences in conversation refer to the ways in which men and women may use language differently in terms of style, structure, and interactional goals. These differences have been a major focus in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Early studies of gender differences found that men interrupt women more than vice versa, a result that has not been found as often recently. Studies of conversational participants flesh out an outline of conversational processes sketched earlier in the chapter while, at the same time, suggesting new avenues for research and theory. Women use conversation to build relationships and express emotions.

Men use conversation to exchange information and assert dominance.

Women tend to be more polite, indirect, and cooperative in speech.

Men are often more direct, assertive, and competitive.

Women talk more about personal topics (feelings, relationships).

Men prefer external topics (sports, news, facts).

Women use more questions, apologies, and backchanneling ("mm-hmm," "yeah").

Men interrupt more and are less likely to show verbal or nonverbal support.

Women use more eye contact, facial expressions, and gestures.

Men tend to be more reserved and use less expressive body language.

five concerns of second period of Psycholinguistics IMP

The second period of interdisciplinary psycholinguistics really took hold in the late 1950s, beginning with the emergence of the linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has also played a powerful role in how psychologists perceived language because he argued that the behaviorists’ accounts of language were inadequate. Major concerns presented in that period consist of associative chain theory, discontinuous constituents, and poverty of stimulus.

major concerns of this period:

1) Language Acquisition 2) Syntax and Grammar Structures 3) Mental Representations of Language 4) Psychological Reality of Linguistic Constructs 5) Language Processing 6) Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH)

Difference between working and long-term memory? IMP

Working memory OR Short-term memory (STM):

Working memory is only able to hold about seven units of information. This could simply be seven words, but because many sentences are longer than this, we need some way to deal immediately with more than seven words. One way we do this is to chunk the words into grammatical constituents such as noun and verb phrases, thereby reducing the storage burden to