tag question

in linguistics, a short interrogative clause attached to the end of a statement to invite the agreement of a listener, as in The bird flew away, didn’t it? or We’ve not been here before, have we? In English, the form of the tag question is determined by the structure of the main statement and a combination of linguistic rules involving pronominalization, negation, interrogation, and truncation, as seen in the examples given above. The ability of young children to form appropriate tag questions is considered a prime illustration of their early mastery of linguistic rules.

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Psychology term of the day

February 17th 2025

maze-bright and maze-dull rats

two groups of rats that were separated based on their performance in a standardized maze problem. Those that performed best were bred with each other, as were those that performed most poorly. Over relatively few generations, there was a complete separation in performance, with none of the maze-bright rats overlapping in scores with maze-dull rats. However, the selective breeding appeared to be specific to the maze tests that were used and did not affect learning ability more generally; moreover, maze-dull rats reared in an enriched environment (see enrichment) could perform as well as maze-bright rats.