The Wug test (English language Alevel)

Jean Berko Gleason-

(born 1931) is a retired psycholinguist professor at Boston UNI. Gleason has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition (a topic I am currently studying and reading about it Languge acquisition by David Crystal) in children, aphasia (language disorders causes by brain damage), gender differences in language development, and parent-child interactions. 

The Wug test-

Her experiment aimed to investigate the acquisition of the plural and other inflectional morphemes in English-speaking children. The Wug test consisted of presenting the child with a made up creature which Gleason named a 'Wug' then presenting another and asking 'Now there are two...?' On this cue, most of the children had replied 'Wugs', applying the correct plural suffix 's' to the noun despite having never heard of this 'Wug' before. Her test showed that children have productive rules, they don’t learn by hearing every possible form as they hadn’t heard ‘wugs’ due to it being made up but by applying linguistic rules that they had picked up elsewhere and now subconciosuly know. Smart, eh? 

This could be linked to the old Nature v. Nurture debate on how we acquire language as the children couldnt of learnt 'wugs' if they'd never heard it so there must be an element of nature here. 

Gleason's findings also link and could provide evidence for Chomskys theory of 'universal grammar'.

My response-

I found this experiment both fascinating and amusing and spent the next week asking my friends and family of different ages 'now there are two...?' often getting puzzled looked, confused giggles and the repeated question 'but what is a 'wug'?!' But then i spotted differences between different the childrens and adults answers, similar to what Gleason found. Adults were more likely to say 'wug' as well as 'wugs' probably due to their greater grammatical understanding of irregular nouns and their plural suffixes for example the plural of sheep is 'sheep' not 'sheeps'. This is something a younger child may not fully understand yet. 

I also found that in some of the other questions asked in the test (see picture below) adults gave less imaginative answers, its almost felt disappointing! For example my mum answered 'tiny Wug' and 'Wug house' tut tut, whereas my younger brother answered 'wugglet' and 'Wugloo' (inspired by pigglet and igloo. Cute, isnt it?) 

I also decided to do some further investigation by reading online articles and short videos on youtube and found the conclusions of Gleason research stimulating. Take a look for youself at some of the truley brilliant questions Jean Berko Gleason invented and i suggest asking your family members to answer them for a bit of a chuckle.