Learning color words

Young children struggle with color concepts, and the reason for this may have something
to do with how we use the words that describe them.

A In the course of the first few years of their lives, children who are brought up in
English- speaking homes successfully master the use of hundreds of words. Words for
objects, actions, emotions, and many other aspects of the physical world quickly become
part of their infant repertoire. For some reason, however, when it comes to learning
color words, the same children perform very badly. At the age of four months, babies
can distinguish between basic color categories. Yet it turns out they do this in much the
same way as blind children. "Blue" and "yellow" appear in older children's expressive
language in answer to questions such as "What color is this?", but their mapping of
objects to individual colors is haphazard and interchangeable. If shown a blue cup and
asked about its color, typical two-year-olds seem as likely to come up with "red" as
"blue." Even after hundreds of training trials, children as old as four may still end
up being unable to accurately sort objects by color.

B In an effort to work out why this is, cognitive scientists at Stanford University in
California hypothesized that children's incompetence at color-word learning may be
directly linked to the way these words are used in English. While word order for color
adjectives varies, they are used overwhelmingly in pre-nominal position (e.g. "blue cup");
in other words, the adjective comes before the noun it is describing. This is in contrast to
post-nominal position (e.g. "The cup is blue") where the adjective comes after the noun.
It seems that the difficulty children have may not be caused by any unique property of
color, or indeed, of the world. Rather, it may simply come down to the challenge of
having to make predictions from color words to the objects they refer to, instead of
being able to make predictions from the world of objects to the color words.
To illustrate, the word "chair" has a meaning that applies to the somewhat varied set of
entities in the world that people use for sitting on. Chairs have features, such as arms and
legs and backs, that are combined to some degree in a systematic way; they turn up in a
range of chairs of different shapes, sizes, and ages. It could be said that children learn to
narrow down the set of cues that make up a chair and in this way they learn the concept
associated with that word. On the other hand, color words tend to be unique and not
bound to other specific co-occurring features; there is nothing systematic about
color words to help cue their meaning. In the speech that adults direct at children,
color adjectives occur pre-nominally ("blue cup") around 70 percent of the time.
This suggests that most of what children hear from adults will, in fact, be unhelpful
in learning what color words refer to.

C To explore this idea further, the research team recruited 41 English children aged
between 23 and 29 months and carried out a three- phase experiment. It consisted of
a pre-test, followed by training in the use of color words, and finally a post-test that was
identical to the pre-test. The pre- and post-test materials comprised six objects that were
novel (adj): new to the children. There were three examples of each object in each of
three colors—red, yellow, and blue. The objects were presented on trays, and in both
tests, the children were asked to pick out objects in response to requests in which the
color word was either a prenominal ("Which is the red one?") or a post-nominal ("Which
one is red?").

In the training, the children were introduced to a "magic bucket" containing five sets of
items familiar to 26-month-olds (balls, cups, crayons, glasses, and toy bears) in each of
the three colors. The training was set up so that half the children were presented with the
items one by one and heard them labelled with color words used pre-nominally ("This is
a red crayon"), while the other half were introduced to the same items described with a
post-nominal color word ("This crayon is red"). After the training, the children repeated
the selection task on the unknown items in the post-test. To assess the quality of
children's understanding of the color words, and the effect of each type of training,
correct choices on items that were consistent across the pre- and post-tests were used to
measure children's color knowledge.

D Individual analysis of pre- and post-test data, which confirmed parental vocabulary
reports, showed the children had at least some knowledge of the three colour words: they
averaged two out of three correct choices in response to both pre- and post-nominal
question types, which, it has been pointed out, is better than chance. When children's
responses to the question types were assessed independently, performance was at its most
consistent when children were both trained and tested on post-nominal adjectives, and
worst when trained on pre-nominal adjectives and tested on post-nominal adjectives.
Only children who had been trained with post- nominal color-word presentation and then
tested with post-nominal question types were significantly more accurate than chance.
Comparing the pre- and post-test scores across each condition revealed a significant
decline in performance when children were both pre- and post-tested with questions that
placed the color words pre-nominally.

As predicted, when children are exposed to color adjectives in post-nominal

position, they learn them rapidly (after just five training trials per color); when they
are presented with them pre-nominally, as English overwhelmingly tends to do,
children show no signs of learning.

Questions 1-4

The Reading Passage has four sections A-D.

Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.

List of Headings

i A possible explanation

ii Why names of objects are unhelpful

iii Checking out the theory

iv A curious state of affairs = situation

v The need to look at how words are formed

vi How age impacts on learning colours

vii Some unsurprising data

1 Section A ……………. iv

2 Section B ……………. i

3 Section C ……………. iii

4 Section D ……………. vii

Questions 5-9

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The Hypothesis

Children learn many words quite quickly, but their ability to learn colour words takes longer
than expected.

In fact, despite 5 …training trials…………. many four-year olds still struggle to arrange
objects into colour categories.

Scientists have hypothesised that this is due to the 6 …post-nominal position…………. of

the adjectives in a phrase or sentence and the challenges this presents.
While objects consist of a number of 7 …features…………. that can be used to recognise
other similar objects, the 8 …meaning…………. of a colour cannot be developed using the
same approach. As a consequence, the way colour words tend to be used in English may
be 9 …unhelpful…………. to children.

Questions 10-11

Which TWO of the following statements about the experiment are true?

A The children were unfamiliar with the objects used in the pre- and post-test.

B The children had to place the pre- and post-test objects onto coloured trays.

C The training was conducted by dividing the children into two groups.

D Pre-nominal questions were used less frequently than post-nominal questions in the
training.

E The researchers were looking for inconsistencies in children's knowledge of word

order.

Questions 12-13

Which TWO of the following outcomes are reported in the passage?

A Average results contradicted parental assessment of children’s knowledge.

B Children who were post-tested using post-nominal adjectives performed well,

regardless of the type of training.

C Greatest levels of improvement were achieved by children who were trained and post-
tested using post-nominal adjectives.
D Some children performed less well in the post-test than in the pre-test.

E Some children were unable to accurately name any of the colours in the pre- and post-
tests.

The truth about lying

Over the years Richard Wiseman has tried to unravel = untangle the truth about
deception - investigating the signs that give away a liar.

In the 1970s, as part of a large-scale research programme exploring the area of

Interspecies communication, Dr Francine Patterson from Stanford University attempted
to teach two lowland gorillas called Michael and Koko a simplified version of Sign
Language. According to Patterson, the great apes were capable of holding meaningful
conversations, and could even reflect upon profound topics, such as love and death.
During the project, their trainers believe they uncovered instances where the two gorillas'
linguistic skills seemed to provide reliable evidence of intentional deceit. In one example,
Koko broke a toy cat, and then signed to indicate that the breakage had been caused by
one of her trainers.

In another episode, Michael ripped a jacket belonging to a trainer and, when asked who
was responsible for the incident, signed ‘Koko’. When the trainer expressed some
scepticism, Michael appeared to change his mind, and indicated that Dr Patterson was
actually responsible, before finally confessing.

Other researchers have explored the development of deception in children. Some of the
most interesting experiments have involved asking youngsters not to take a peek at their
favourite toys. During these studies, a child is led into a laboratory and asked to face one
of the walls. The experimenter then explains that he is going to set up an elaborate toy a
few feet behind them. After setting up the toy, the experimenter says that he has to leave
the laboratory, and asks the child not to turn around and peek at the toy. The child is
secretly filmed by hidden cameras for a few minutes, and then the experimenter returns
and asks them whether they peeked. Almost all three-year-olds do, and then half of them
lie about it to the experimenter. By the time the children have reached the age of five, all
of them peek and all of them lie. The results provide compelling evidence that lying starts
to emerge the moment we learn to speak.

So what are the tell-tale signs that give away a lie? In 1994, the psychologist Richard
Wiseman devised a large-scale experiment on a TV programme called
Tomorrow's World. As part of the experiment, viewers watched two interviews in which
Wiseman asked a presenter in front of the cameras to describe his favourite film. In one
interview, the presenter picked Some Like It Hotand he told the truth; in the other
interview, he picked Gone with the Wind and lied. The viewers were then invited to
make a choice - to telephone in to say which film he was lying about. More than 30,000
calls were received, but viewers were unable to tell the difference and the vote was a
50/50 split. In similar experiments, the results have been remarkably consistent - when it
comes to lie detection, people might as well simply toss a coin. It doesn’t matter if you
are male or female, young or old; very few people are able to detect deception.

Why is this? Professor Charles Bond from the Texas Christian University has conducted
surveys into the sorts of behaviour people associate with lying. He has interviewed
thousands of people from more than 60 countries, asking them to describe how they set
about telling whether someone is lying. People’s answers are remarkably consistent.
Almost everyone thinks liars tend to avert their gaze, nervously wave their hands around
and shift about in their seats. There is, however, one small problem. Researchers have
spent hour upon hour carefully comparing films of liars and truth-tellers. The results are
clear. Liars do not necessarily look away from you; they do not appear nervous and move
their hands around or shift about in their seats. People fail to detect lies because they are
basing their opinions on behaviours that are not actually associated with deception.

So what are we missing? It is obvious that the more information you give away, the
greater the chances of some of it coming back to haunt you. As a result, liars tend to say
less and provide fewer details than truth-tellers. Looking back at the transcripts of the
interviews with the presenter, his lie about Gone with the Wind contained about 40
words, whereas the truth about Some Like It Hot was nearly twice as long. People who
lie also try psychologically to keep a distance from their falsehoods, and so tend to
include fewer references to themselves in their stories. In his entire interview about
Gone with the Wind, the presenter only once mentioned how the film made him feel,
compared with the several references to his feelings when he talked about
Some Like It Hot.

The simple fact is that the real clues to deceit are in the words that people use, not the
body language. So do people become better lie detectors when they listen to a liar, or
even just read a transcript of their comments? The interviews with the presenter were also
broadcast on radio and published in a newspaper, and although the lie-detecting abilities
of the television viewers were no better than chance, the newspaper readers were correct
64% of the time, and the radio listeners scored an impressive 73% accuracy rate.

adapted from The National Newspaper

The reading passage has six paragraphs, A-F.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

List of headings

i Some of the things liars really do

ii When do we begin to lie?

iii How wrong is it to lie?

iv Exposing some false beliefs

v Which form of communication best exposes a lie?

vi Do only humans lie?

vii Dealing with known liars

viii A public test of our ability to spot a lie

14. Paragraph A vi

15. Paragraph B ii

16. Paragraph C viii

17. Paragraph D iv

18. Paragraph E i

19. Paragraph F v

Look at the following statements and the list of experiments below.

Match each statement with the correct experiment, A-C.

You may use any letter more than once.

List of Experiments

A the gorilla experiment

B the experiment with children

C the TV experiment

20. Someone who was innocent was blamed for something. A

21. Those involved knew they were being filmed. C

22. Some objects were damaged. A

23. Some instructions were ignored. B

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage foreach answer.

24. Filming liars has shown that they do not display__nervous______ behaviour.
25. Liars tend to avoid talking about their own ___feelings_____
26. Signs of lying are exposed in people’s __words______rather than their
movements.

The Art of Deception

Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of
young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has
kept him busy ever since. Suppose the group wanted to know, a particular patient swears
they are telling the truth. They look and sound sincere. So here is the question: is there
any way you can be sure they are telling the truth? Ekman did not know the answer then,
but wanted to find out.

As part of his research, he had already filmed a series of 12-minute interviews with
psychiatric patients. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients told him that she
had lied to him. So, Ekman sat and looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then
he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. And suddenly, there,
across just two frames of the film, he saw it: an intense expression of extreme anguish. It
lasted less than a 15th of a second, but once he had spotted the first expression, he soon
found three more examples in that same interview. He termed his discovery "micro-
expression: very rapid intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to be
concealed.

Over the course of the next four decades, Ekman successfully demonstrated a proposition
first suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express rage, disgust,
contempt, fear, surprise. happiness and sadness are universal. The facial muscles
triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially standard,
regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan and Brazil to Papua New
Guinea. What is more, expressions of emotion are Impossible to suppress and,
particularly when we are lying, micro-expressions of powerfully felt emotions will
inevitably flit across our face before we get the chance to stop them.

Fortunately for liars, most people will fail to spot these fleeting (lasting for a very short
time) signals of inner torment. Of the 15,000 Ekman has tested, only 50 people, whom he
calls "naturals", have been able to do it. But given a little more training, Ekman says,
almost anyone can develop the skill. He should know, since these tests were completed in
the mid- 1980s and the first publication of his research, he has been called in by the FBI
and CIA (among countless more law-enforcement and other agencies around the world),
not just to solve cases, but to teach them how to use his technique for themselves. He has
held workshops for defense and prosecution lawyers, health professionals, even jealous
spouses, all of them wanting to know exactly when someone is not being 100 percent
candid.

Most recently, Ekman's research has resulted In a new television series about the exploits
of the fictional Dr Cal Lightman, a scientist who studies involuntary body language to
discover not only if you are lying. But why might you have been motivated to do so?
According to the publicity blurb, Lightman is a human lie detector, even more accurate
than a polygraph test. Ekman concedes he was skeptical when the producer first
approached him with the idea of turning his life's work into a TV series, and initially
would have stopped the project if he could. In particular, he was fearful that the show
would exaggerate the effectiveness of his techniques and create the quite inaccurate
impression among audiences that criminals could no longer hope to get away with lying.
In the worst-case scenario, he was concerned about unfair convictions, that one day
someone not properly trained in his techniques might be sitting on a Jury and wrongly
find someone guilty of a crime simply on the basis of a television programme. In the end
though, he was won over because the series is unusual in several respects. It is the first
time, as far as Ekman is aware, that a commercial TV drama has been based on the work
of just one scientist. That scientist is also deeply involved in the project, talking through
plot ideas and Checking five successive drafts of each script to ensure details are Correct,
He was also impressed with the producer's manifestly serious and well-intentioned
reasons for making the programme. Now that the first series has been completed, he
believes probably 80-90 per cent of the show is based on fact and that's good enough for
what is. After all, a drama, not a documentary.

Ekman, incidentally, professes to have been a terrible liar ever since he was a small boy
and observes that the ability to detect a lie and the ability to lie successfully are
completely unrelated. He has been asked by people running for high office if he could
teach them to become more credible with the public but has always refused to use his
skills in that way on ethical grounds. He also insists that there are various kinds of lies. A
"true" lie can be identified by having two essential characteristics: there must be a
deliberate intent to mislead and there must be no notification that this is what is
occurring. This means that an actor or a poker player isn't a true liar. They are supposed
to deceive you, it's part of the game, and the same is true of flattery. He prefers to focus
on the kinds of lies where the liar would be in grave trouble if they were found out, and
where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.

Questions 27 - 31
Choose the correct letter.

27. According to the writer, Ekman became interested In lying after a question from his

A. peers.

B. patients.

C. students.

D. teachers.

28. The writer refers to the 12-minute interviews in order to

A. illustrate how frequently patients lie.

B. describe the origins of Ekman 's theories.

C. compare Ekman's research to previous studies.

D. show how patients behaviour is affected by filming

29.What is the writer's point in the third paragraph?

A. Micro-expressions are common to all people.

B. Recent research has refuted an old idea.

C. With practice we can learn to control our micro-expression.

D. Human society is too complex to allow for generalisations.

30. What are we told about Ekman's conclusions from his tests?

A. It's natural for people to lie.

B. Few untrained people can detect lying.

C. Most liars suffer from periods of depression.

D. All of his subjects were trained to identify micro expressions.

31.What point does the writer make about Ekman's techniques in the fourth paragraph?

A. They take a decade to teach.

B. They have been in great demand.

C. They have aroused the suspicions of some agencies.

D. They can be used by a limited range of occupations.

Questions 32 - 36
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I.
A new TV series based on Ekman's work features a hero named Lightman, who detects
lies. Initially, Ekman was unenthusiastic about the TV project because he feared the
possibility of encouraging viewers' 32……C…… For example, he was worried that one
day the programme could result In 33……E…….. not being carried out. Ultimately
though, he has given the show his blessing because he is not aware of any other
comparable programme based on a single person's 34……H……… The 35.....D......of the
show's producer have been another pleasant surprise considering the genre of the
programme. Ekman is happy with the Show's overall 36……F…..

A. consequences

B. crimes

C. false beliefs

D. motives

E. justice

F. accuracy

G. acting

H. research

I. ratings

Question 37-40
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage
3? Write:

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks

37. Ekman regrets the lies he told as a child. NG

38. People who are good at lying tend to be good at detecting lies. NO

39. Ekman has worked with poker players to help them lie more convincingly. NG

40. Ekman is more interested in the types of lies with serious consequences. YES