Sample Answers to Essay Tests

How should I start my essay? This is the common problem of the students when answering an essay test.

Essays are usually part of the test. Instructors give this type of test to find out whether the students understand the course material enough to see the relationships between the data and to create some synthesis in their own mind.

Below are sample answers to essay tests for you to reflect on.

1. Down syndrome, named after John Langdon Down, the first physician to identify the syndrome, is a chromosomal disorder caused by an error in cell division resulting in the presence of an additional third chromosome 21 or trisomy 21. 

A 21-year old male patient has been diagnosed of Down Syndrome. Account for his phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic development.

Answer:

Discussed below are the phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic developments of a 21- year male patient who has been diagnosed of Down Syndrome.

As to phonological development, Hamilton (1983) found out that people who age 21 years old with Down syndrome have phonological problems such as typical speech errors largely on the same type of phonemes (i.e. consonant cluster, addition and omission of some phonemes, and syllable final phonemes). Hamilton (1983) added that there exists a several abnormal articulatory characteristics such as more palatal zone contact for alveolar sounds (/t/, /d/, /n/), longer closure duration for occlusive consonants, larger consonant transitions within clusters, difficulty with rapid tongue movements. He confirmed also the existence of dysarthia (i.e. breakdown in the ability to move the tongue and lips in order to articulate speech sounds accurately and rapidly), and dyspraxia (i.e. the ability to select , plan, and sequence the sounds needed in the speech). In addition, Shriberg and Widder (1990) reported the abnormal suprasegmental characteristics regarding five prosodic domains namely: rate of speech, stress, loudness, pitch, and quality of voice – relative harshness, hoarseness, or nasality in his speech. Shuttering is also frequent in him ( Preus, 1972).

As to morphological development, Hamilton (1983) found out that he ( the patient) has little comprehension on some linguistic categories like personal pronoun, articles, verbal inflections, subordinate clauses, negative and passive sentences.

As to syntactic development, people with Down Syndrome like the 21-year old man, have grammatical clauses in their utterances. Randal and Laubert (1983) found out also that sentence complexity remained low. Grammatical marks of gender and number were produced on the average of one or two times in their utterances. Articles such as a, an, the, were infrequently used. Verbs are not regularly inflected.

As to semantic development, Rondal (1978) claimed that people with Down syndrome who age 21 years old appear to structure their utterances, no matter how formally limited they may be- according to the same basic semantic relations ( i.e. agent, semantic object, beneficiary, location, attribution, etc.). Rondal (1978) added that he seemed to understand correctly the same set of basic structural meaning when these meaning are expressed in the speech of other people. He went on by saying that semantic structures and the contents produced are correctly organized. He concluded that their verbal production is relevant and informative, and generally appropriate to the social context and the communicative intents of the locutors.

2. A. Describe the (1) etiology and (2) problems of global aphasia, Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia?
Answer: Broca’s aphasia is primarily a disorder that affects a person’s ability to form sentences with the rules of syntax. Broca’s aphasia is named after the French surgeon Paul Broca who claimed at a scientific meeting in Paris that language is localized to the left hemisphere of the brain ( now called Broca’s area) and claimed that we speak with the left hemisphere. Broca’s finding was based on the study of his patients who suffered language deficits after brain injury to the left frontal lobe. People who are suffering from Broca’s aphasia have the following problems: ( a):Language produced is often agrammatic . It means that it frequently lacks articles, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary,, verbs and other grammatical elements. They also typically delete inflections such as the past tense suffix –ed or the third person singular verb ending n –s ;(b).Difficulty in understanding complex sentences in which comprehension depends exclusively on syntactic structure and where they cannot rely on their real-world knowledge. For example, an agrammatic aphasic may have difficulty in knowing who kissed whom in question like : Which girl did the boy kiss?, where it is equally plausible for the boy or the girl to have done the kissing.

Another disorder is Wernicke’s aphasia which is named after Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist who described an aphasia that occurred in patients with lesions in areas of the left hemisphere temporal lobe, now known as Wernicke’s area. People with Wernicke’s aphasia produce fluent speech with good intonation, and they may largely adhere to the rules of syntax. However, their language is often semantically incoherent. For example, one patient replied to a question about his health with: I felt worse because I can no longer keep in mind from the mind of the minds to keep me from mind and up to the ear which can be to find among ourselves. Another problem of people with Wernicke’s aphasia is having a difficulty of naming objects presented to them and also in choosing words in spontaneous speech. They may make numerous lexical errors ( word substitutions) , often producing jargons and nonsense words.

And the last is global aphasia which profoundly impairs all aspects of language – oral and written production as well as auditory and written comprehension. The syndrome is due to a large lesion to the left perisylvian cortex ( Kartesz, Lesk, Mc Cabe, 1977). Global aphasia is referred to as the most severe type of aphasia. It is often seen right someone has a stroke. Global aphasia is caused by injuries to language-processing areas of the brain, notably Wernicke’s ad Broca’s areas. Most often, the injuries are the result of a large middle-cerebral artery stroke. People with global aphasia face problem with word-based communication skills such as writing, reading, speaking, and understanding speech. Moreover, few of them are mute and some can produce sounds like “ta-ta” or stereotypic phrases such as “We said”. They can sometimes use simple words , such as expletives. People with global aphasia are marked by a severe impairment of both understanding and expression of language.

B. Does aphasia affect intelligence?

No. it does not. A person may face difficulty retrieving names, and words but the person’s intelligence is intact. For person’s with aphasia, it is the ability to access ideas and thought through language- not the ideas and thoughts themselves- that is disrupted.