Chapter 10 Study Guide
1. The word communication comes from what Latin word?
Communicare to share, impart or make common
2. What is the major transmitter of culture?
Spoken language.
3. What is included in nonverbal behavior to convey a message?
Body language
4. Is nonverbal communication universal?
Yes
5. What type of information can be inferred from an accent?
Place of origin and education.
6. Is communication unique to humans?
No.
7. What is symbolic communication?
The word or symbol refers to something no present and is arbitrary.
8. What is a referent?
Whatever is referred to.
9. How is the meaning of symbolic communication arbitrary?
The received of an arbitrary word could not guess its meaning from its
sounds and it is not known instinctively.
10. What does it mean when a vocal system is closed?
Different calls are not combined to create new, useful utterances.
11. A 6 month old infant has the ability to distinguish how many consonants and
vowels?
600 consonants and 200 vowels.
12. Children around the world learn language at what age?
12 13 months
13. When linguists talk about rules of grammar, what are they referring to?
The rules that you learn in school to speak correctly.
14. How does a linguist define grammar?
Actual, often unconscious principles that that predict how most people
talk.
15. Define phonology?
The rules or principles that predict how sounds are made and how they
are used.
16. Define morphology?
How sound sequences convey meaning and how meaningful sequences
are strung together to form words.
17. What is syntax?
How words are strung together to form phrases.
18. Define the word phone from a linguistic perspective.
Different sounds
19. What is a phoneme?
A sound or set of sounds that makes a difference in meaning in that
language. Lake, rake, take, cake.
20. Define the word morph linguistically.
The smallest unit of language that has a meaning. I.e. prefix in-, un-, pro-,
con-
21. What is a lexicon?
Consists of words and morphs and their meaning. A Dictionary.
22. How does an open language system allow for the creation of new words?
We can make up meaningful utterances that we have never heard before.
23. What does the field of historical linguistics study?
It studies how languages change over time.
24. What is ancestral language to Romance languages?
Latin
25. What is a dialect?
A variant form of a language
26. What is the cause for the creation of a dialect?
Geographic barriers and isolation of populations that speak the same
language create dialects.
27. How is lexical content a reflection of a culture?
Lexical content, or vocabulary, is important because it singles out which
events, objects or experiences are important enough to have a name.
28. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
That language is a force that affects how individuals in a society perceive
and conceive reality.
29. Why is the ethnography of speaking so important in cross cultural
communication?
Cultural and subcultural speech variation in different social contexts is
important because it helps people to understand what should be talked
about under different conditions.
30. How is status reflected in speech?
Status can be reflected by using a title along with the last name in a formal
way.
31. How is gender reflected in speech?
This can be reflected in several ways, including men and women using
different words to convey the same meaning, or be as simple as women
speaking in a more correct form than men.
32. Why is language so valuable in understanding a particular culture?
It helps us to communicate ideas and learn from that particular culture and
expresses what is and is not important in that particular culture by the way
they speak in a language.
