This review guide is intended to help you organize your studying and preparation for the midterm. You are strongly encouraged to review lecture outline slides and data sets, your own notes, assigned readings (including handouts), and past assignments and their feedback.
On the exam, you may be asked to apply what you know to a new or unfamiliar situation.
Study strategies: Research shows that reading over materials and highlighting key terms is not necessarily the best way to study for an exam. Instead, strategies where you actively engage with the material — such as quizzing yourself, inventing (and answering) your own questions, organizing concepts into mindmaps, or re-doing practice problems or assignments without looking at your original answers — are found to be more effective. Preparing your notes sheet (see below) will also help you learn the material! (Here are more great exam study tips from UNC's Learning Center.)
1. What to expect / how to prepare
- The exam is in class, on paper, closed-book
- Expect mostly application and problem-solving questions; for example:
- Distinguish between two set of segments (speech sounds)
- Provide the "next step" in an analysis that is started for you
- Analyze morpheme alternations in a data set
- Justify a choice between alternative analyses or approaches
- Explain how to test the predictions of a (possibly new!) model or proposal against data
- There may be a (brief) essay question on a topic such as:
- When scientists build models of the phenomena they are studying, what does this allow them to do?
- Why is it important to understand what a model predicts, even when you are pretty sure that the model is wrong?
- You may prepare and bring one page of notes:
- Letter-size paper (8.5 x 11 inches) or A4, or smaller
- On one side, you may print out the handout "List of phonological features in our model"
- You may add notes on both sides of the paper
- Other than the list of features,
your notes page must be handwritten — no screenshots or scans of pre-existing class materials
- If you handwrite on your device and print the result, that's okay
- Your notes page must be turned in with the exam (it won't be graded)
2. Topics covered: Research Questions 1 and 2
- Basic analysis of sound patterns
- Know the basic phonetic properties of all consonants and vowels assigned for the phonetics review quiz
- Identify the crucial difference(s) between classes of segments, as when specifying the target or environment of a phonological rule
- Our feature model
- Know what broad segment classes each feature value distinguishes between
- Use feature notation to describe specific segment classes
- Use feature notation to describe the differences between segments or segment classes
- Use feature notation to describe the changes imposed by the grammar in a phonological process
- Morphological alternation
- Separate words into morphemes in a data set
- Identify alternating morphemes and characterize their crucial environments
- Choose the best analysis (UR+phonological process(s) combination) of the alternation
- General concepts relating to rules
- Use features insightfully to state the target, change, and environment for a rule
- When applicable, make generalizations across individual cases to state a single general rule
- Be able to demonstrate how your proposed rules apply to URs and produce the appropriate SRs
- Models in scientific investigation
- Apply the tools of a model to the analysis of a phonological data set
- Explain and test the predictions of a model