Asked by April Canino on Jul 15, 2024

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Seven-year-old Tracy heard a joke in school and asks you: "How could you find a lost dog in the woods?" When you are stumped, she tells you: "You stand near a tree and listen for the bark". Tracy's play on words indicates that she is developing

A) metalinguistic awareness.
B) psycholinguistic skills.
C) linguistic relativity.
D) the ability to use linguistic heuristics.

Metalinguistic Awareness

The ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural elements of language.

Psycholinguistic Skills

The cognitive processes that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.

Linguistic Relativity

The hypothesis that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition, often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

  • Describe the role of metalinguistic awareness in language understanding and humor.
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ZH
Zesheng HuangJul 17, 2024
Final Answer :
A
Explanation :
Tracy's play on words indicates that she is developing metalinguistic awareness, which is the ability to reflect on language and understand it as a system. In this case, she is playing with the homophones "bark" (the sound a dog makes) and "bark" (the outer layer of a tree), showing an understanding of multiple meanings of words and how they can be manipulated in language.