Practice Questions

There will be questions on the final exam on structural ambiguity and on testing children's language using Truth Value Judgment Tasks. Here are a couple of practice questions to help you to prepare. You do not need to answer them, but you are welcome to do so, and you are also welcome to send sample answers to colin@umd.edu for feedback. (No guarantee that answers sent late on Tuesday night will be returned in time for the final!)

1. Phrase Structure - Ambiguity Again

The following sentence has a number of different possible interpretations:

(i) William decided that he would drink the liquid in the bathtub in the basement.

How many different structures/interpretations can you find? What is the structure associated with each meaning?

You will need to use the following two modifier rules for attaching the PPs.

(ii) VP --> VP PP
(iii) NP --> NP PP

For the embedded clause, you can treat the word "would" as an Auxiliary (some of you know this as a 'helping verb'), and you can add the rule

(iv) S --> NP Aux VP.

Tip: we strongly recommend that you do not try this question by simply looking at the sentence and trying to think of as many possible meanings as you can. It will be more effective if you approach this question by thinking about possible structures that you can assign to the sentence, thinking in particular about which positions the two PP modifiers can attach to. Once you have figured out possible structures, you can examine the structures to see what each of them means. If you find a systematic way to do this, then the question should become fairly straightforward.

Tip 2: when explaining the meanings, be careful to make sure that your explanation is not itself ambiguous!

2. Truth Value Judgment Task

a. First take a look at the story The Jumping Contest, which is used to test children's understanding of a sentence like "He thinks the Troll is the best jumper", on the interpretation which violates Principle C.

Based on the discussion in class about the Truth Value Judgment Task, explain how the experiment works - in particular, what parts of the design of the story are crucial for getting the experiment to be a fair test of children's knowledge? Try to be as specific as possible in your answers.

b. Try to construct a new story, using the same task, which could be used to test the Principle C constraint in the sentence She said that Goldilocks liked the watermelon best.

Remember that your goal is to use the Truth Value Judgment task to create a fair test of whether a child (aged 3-5) can understand "she" to mean "Goldilocks" in the sentence above. No pictures needed. A simple storyline/dialog is sufficient. One thing that can be very helpful in doing this is to add editorial comments to your story, explaining how specific parts of your story achieve particular requirements of the Truth Value Judgment Task. For example, you could present your story in the form of a two column table. In the first column provide the text of the story. In the second column, give annotations showing what the different parts of the story achieve.

c. Now try to use the same technique to create a test for another constraint on the interpretation of pronouns and similar elements. Consider the following two sentences:

a. Ernie thinks that Cookie Monster scratched himself.
b. Ernie thinks that Cookie Monster scratched him.

The reflexive pronoun in (a) can only refer to Cookie Monster, and cannot refer to Ernie; in contrast, the pronoun in (b) cannot refer to Cookie Monster, but can refer to Ernie (or to somebody else). [Note: these restrictions do not follow from Principle C - they reflect a related constraint that we have not discussed in class.]

Try to construct a story that could be used to test whether children respect the same constraints as adults in interpreting sentences like (a) and (b). Is it possible to construct a single story that can be used to test both (a) and (b)? Or are two different stories needed?