Author Question: Which of the following is not a reasonable criticism of research attempting to demonstrate language ... (Read 236 times)

savannahhooper · **on:** Jun 19, 2018

Which of the following is not a reasonable criticism of research attempting to demonstrate language learning with nonhuman primates?

a. The animals' vocabularies are much less extensive than normal two- to three-year-old human children.
b. The animals' sentences are much less complicated than those of human children.
c. Judgments of what the animals are saying may be contaminated by experimenter bias.
d. The animals don't have a language acquisition device, so they can't really be learning language.

Question 2

Based on research with nonhuman primates, many researchers believed that there really was not much that is unique about humans' language skills. One challenge to this line of thinking is that ____.

a. nonhuman primates were able to combine gestures into more and more complex and elaborate messages
b. children use languages spontaneously and creatively, while nonhuman primates lack this tendency
c. nonhuman primates never learned to combine words in systematic order
d. nonhuman primates could generate complex messages once they had learned the basic symbols