MLAT Phonetic Coding & Sound Discrimination 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: The MLAT tests phonetic coding partly by presenting words in an artificial script. What is the primary purpose of using an artificial language?
- To test reading speed
- To eliminate prior knowledge advantages (Correct answer)
- To measure grammatical intuition
- To assess vocabulary breadth
Correct answer: To eliminate prior knowledge advantages
An artificial language ensures that no test-taker has an unfair advantage from previous exposure, isolating the pure ability to learn new sound-symbol correspondences.
Question 2: Which phonetic feature distinguishes the sounds /s/ and /ʃ/ (as in 'sip' vs. 'ship')?
- Voicing
- Place of articulation (Correct answer)
- Nasality
- Aspiration
Correct answer: Place of articulation
Both /s/ and /ʃ/ are voiceless fricatives, but /s/ is alveolar (tongue near the alveolar ridge) while /ʃ/ is postalveolar (tongue further back).
Question 3: In a phonetic discrimination task, a test-taker hears pairs of syllables and must judge if they are the same or different. This task measures sensitivity to:
- Syntactic structure
- Phonemic contrast (Correct answer)
- Vocabulary size
- Morphological rules
Correct answer: Phonemic contrast
Same-different tasks directly measure whether a learner can detect meaningful sound contrasts (phonemic contrasts) between spoken syllables.
Question 4: The word 'butter' in American English is often pronounced with a flap sound in the middle. This flap is an example of:
- A phoneme
- An allophone of /t/ (Correct answer)
- A diphthong
- A nasal consonant
Correct answer: An allophone of /t/
The intervocalic flap [ɾ] in American English is an allophone of both /t/ and /d/ — a predictable variant that occurs in a specific phonetic environment.
Question 5: A language learner who can accurately imitate foreign sounds immediately after hearing them but forgets them quickly most likely has a deficit in:
- Phonetic perception
- Phonetic memory encoding (Correct answer)
- Articulatory motor control
- Inductive reasoning
Correct answer: Phonetic memory encoding
Being able to imitate immediately but not retain suggests perception is intact; the weakness is in encoding those sounds into a durable memory trace.
Question 6: Which of these English consonants is produced by completely stopping airflow and then releasing it?
- /f/
- /s/
- /p/ (Correct answer)
- /v/
Correct answer: /p/
The sound /p/ is a stop (or plosive) — the lips seal to completely block airflow, which is then released in a burst.
Question 7: On the MLAT phonetic coding subtest, higher scores are most strongly associated with which real-world language outcome?
- Wider vocabulary in the native language
- Faster acquisition of foreign language pronunciation (Correct answer)
- Better performance on standardized grammar tests
- Greater reading speed in the native language
Correct answer: Faster acquisition of foreign language pronunciation
High phonetic coding ability predicts how quickly and accurately a learner can acquire and retain the sound system of a foreign language.
MLAT Phonetic Coding & Sound Discrimination 4
The MLAT tests phonetic coding partly by presenting words in an artificial script.
What is the primary purpose of using an artificial language?