SAT OwlQuestion bank / Cross-Text Connections
Text 1: Linguist Amara Diallo argues that children learn grammar mainly by detecting statistical patterns in the speech around them, noting how often certain words and endings appear together.
Text 2: When deaf children in Nicaragua were first brought together in new schools in the late 1970s and 1980s, they developed a new sign language. Researchers found that younger children who joined later used grammatical rules more consistently than the older children whose signing they had learned from. To some linguists, this suggests that children do not simply absorb the patterns around them but also impose structure of their own.
Based on the texts, how would the linguists described in Text 2 most likely respond to Diallo's argument in Text 1?
They would argue that pattern detection can't fully explain how children learn grammar, since children can make a language more regular than what they hear.
They would agree that children learn grammar only by copying the patterns in the speech of older people around them.
They would claim that sign languages, unlike spoken languages, have no real grammatical rules for children to learn.
They would argue that children learn the grammar of a new language more slowly than Diallo's argument suggests.
Show answer and explanation
Answer: A
Diallo says children learn grammar mainly from patterns in what they hear. The younger Nicaraguan children used rules more consistently than the signing they learned from, so they added regularity that wasn't in their input. The linguists would say pattern detection can't be the whole story, choice A.
Choice B gets the linguists backward. They argue that children do more than copy what they hear.
Why the other choices are wrong
- B. Text 2 says children impose structure of their own, the opposite of only copying older speakers.
- C. Text 2 describes the children using grammatical rules, so these linguists think sign languages have grammar.
- D. Text 2 is about how children learn grammar, not how fast, so it gives no basis for this.
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