Noam Chomsky proposed that we all are born with a "language acquisition device" in our minds, which gives us universal principles of human language. We learn our language's own "settings" for human communication according to these universal principles. For instance, if all human language has temporal tenses, we learn how our particular language expresses tense. Although the behaviorists believe we only learn language through our environment, Chomsky pointed out that we learn language very quickly through processes that appear similar to the human species, regardless of environment.

Minimal pairs are used in phonology to find sounds that lie in contrastive distribution which make them phonemes of a language. Minimal pairs are words that are only separated by one sound. For instance, "fate" and "bait" are separated by the first sounds "f" and "b" and otherwise sound the same. This means that "f" and "b" are phonemes of English: they are sounds that distinguish between the meaning of words.

Wernicke's area, located in the upper temporal lobe, contains motor neurons involved in the comprehension of speech. A person with a malfunctioning Wernicke's area will have difficulty understanding what others are saying. Broca's area is involved in producing speech, and none of the other answer choices are directly involved in speech-related processes.

Semantic slanting is used when a person wants to say the same thing but affect their listener in a different way. It can be highly manipulative and is often used in advertising or politically sensitive situations. Take as an example the given question, a person gets demoted but is told that they are being "given" a "growth opportunity" as opposed to having their current position taken away from them. Semantic slanting is not always necessarily manipulative. The speaker may regard what they are framing in a different light as true; therefore, he or she will be using semantic slanting in a genuine manner. For instance, if I want to say a person does not look good in a hat, then I might say, "I think other hats suit you better.”

Before anyone utters a sentence, there is a lot of work involved in order to produce it. This may be misleading due to how fast we speak; however, there are at least four known steps involved in producing sentences. Before anything, we must have a hunch of what we want to say. That is, we must have an idea of the semantics of our sentence, which composes a "deep structure" for us to subsequently impose grammar and phonology.

When listening to a sentence, using given information to connect new information to memory is known as the “given-new strategy.” Although the other answers may sound correct, the given-new strategy is a technical linguistic term for what happens when we process sentences. When someone says, "I like eating out too,” the speaker is relying on already established information to add new information. The old information is that the listener has already expressed they like eating out. The new information is that the person speaking also enjoys eating out.

Broca's area is a region of the frontal lobe of the cortex, and is linked to the ability to produce speech. Damage to Broca's area can lead to Broca's aphasia, which is the inability to speak out loud.

In contrast, Wernicke's area is located in the temporal lobe of the cortex and is credited with processing and interpreting the speech of others. Damage to Wernicke's area could leave a patient unable to comprehend a spoken request. Remembering a phone number would require processing by the hippocampus, which is a component of the limbic system credited with memory storage. Blue-yellow color blindness arises when a genetic disorder leaves the individual unable to produce cones that detect light at short wavelengths (such as blue).

Noam Chomsky, a famous linguist, was the one to propose that a language acquisition device resides in the brain, which we inherit through our biological make-up. The others listed as answers were certainly theorists in their own right though the only one close to a linguistics theorist was J.M. Skinner. Skinner believed that language was acquired through behavioral reinforcement as opposed to any innate predisposition, which directly contradicts Chomsky's theory.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (also known as linguistic relativity) states that language shapes the way we see the world. The strong version of the theory states that language determines thought, whereas the weak version states that language merely influences some non-linguistic processes.

This question requires knowledge of the definitions of phonemes and morphemes-- two elements of speech. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that are recognizable as human speech and make words distinct from one another, such as the "p" at the beginning of the word "pat" that distinguishes "pat" from "bat" and "hat." Morphemes, on the other hand, are the smallest meaningful units of sound; after all, the sound made by the letter P doesn't really mean anything by itself. Examples of morphemes include the "-ed" on the end of the word "finished."