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Jean Berko Gleason

Jean Berko Gleason

Profilee, Secret Life Team

Jean is the inventor of the wugs, one of the mothers of the field of psycholinguistics, and an extremely “efficient” driver. She is also a Professor Emerita at Boston University. Watch her videos and find out more on her profile page.

Jean's Secret Life Posts

Jean Berko Gleason

Secret Life Post Card: Jean Plays Polo

Posted by Jean Berko Gleason | 25 November 2010

Our scientists and engineers have LOTS of secret lives. And sometimes they send us post cards. This one is from our beloved Jean Berko Gleason.

This is a photo of my daughter Pam and me on Pam’s farm outside of Aiken, S.C.

Pam played polo at Yale, and now plays in Aiken, where she edits and publishes a newspaper about the horse world, “The Aiken Horse” (I’m the associate editor). The Aiken Horse team won the final Sunday polo match of the year on November 14 at historic Whitney Field in Aiken.

Pam is a fierce competitor on the field, while I, like Ralph Lauren, prefer the more sartorial aspects of the sport.

Eat your heart out, Ralph Lauren. Continue >
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Jean Berko Gleason

Trick or Treat: The Halloween Routine

Posted by Jean Berko Gleason | 31 October 2010

Halloween is today and children need to know some special language to be successful Trick-or-Treaters. But first, here’s a puzzler: On Halloween, costumed kids are going door-to-door, saying “trick or treat!” But one kid says “good evening!” Who is he dressed up to be? The answer’s at the end of this post.

He needs some routinized language… and some shoes. So we did a study of over 100 children on three Halloweens. Our interest was the special “trick or treat” linguistic routine used on this one day of the year. Children need to produce the routine, but they don’t have to know what it means—in fact little children have no idea what tricks or treats are. Other early routines adults want children to perform are “bye-bye,” “hi,” and “thank you.” Routines are different from most of children’s language, where adults want children to say only things that are true. By contrast, adults teach children to say “thank you” whether they feel thankful or not.

The basic Halloween routine is “trick or treat,” “thank you,” and “goodbye.” If you watch the kids who ring your doorbell, you will probably see that the little ones who are around 3 years old don’t say anything—they just hold their bags open. Kids of about 4 or 5 say “trick or treat.” Somewhat older children say “trick or treat” and “thank you,” and children over 10 say “trick or treat,” “thank you,” and “goodbye.” You may also see parents standing on the sidewalk saying things like “Don’t forget to say ‘trick or treat’ and ‘thank you!’” All this illustrates that it in order to have communicative competence in a language it’s important for speakers to know what to say in many social situations, even ones that occur only once a year. Although most of the time children know the meaning of the words they use, there are also moments when they have to produce linguistic routines like “trick or treat.”

Answer to the puzzler: Did you say “Dracula”? If you did, that shows that you have a complex understanding of our Halloween social ritual.

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Jean Berko Gleason

What’s A Wug?

Posted by Jean Berko Gleason | 07 October 2010

“What’s a wug?” is a question people often ask me when they hear that I developed the Wug Test. A wug is a mythical little creature that looks rather like a bird. It’s included in a series of pictures I drew for a study of kids’ acquisition of English. We wanted to know if children know more about language than just the things they’ve heard from others. For instance, do preschoolers “know” how to make a plural? Adults do: if your friend says he had an “abdominoplasty” and you’ve never heard the word before you still know what two of them are called. Adults know that to make a plural you add some form of -s to the word.
Snug as a bug in a rug? No way, it’s a wug! (The Wug and Wug Test ©Jean Berko Gleason 2006. All rights reserved. For individual & family use only)

To find out if kids have the same sort of knowledge we needed to use natural-sounding words that they didn’t already know. If we used real words like “dog,” they might know the plural “dogs,” but this could be an imitation of what they heard from adults. So I invented the little animal called a “wug,” a name that we could be sure they never heard before. We showed them pictures of a wug, and said “This is a wug.” Then we showed them another picture and said, “Now there’s another one. There are two of them. There are two….??” To our delight, even preschoolers could add the plural ending and tell us that there were two “wugs.” We used this invented word method to check kids’ knowledge of plurals, possessives, verb tenses, and a variety of other important features of English and found that by the age of 4 they could provide all the most common forms.

Children learn how to make regular plurals and past tenses before the irregular ones, and sometimes we can see that they have this linguistic knowledge by the kinds of “mistakes” they make. So the next time your 4-year-old friend says “I falled down and hurted myself,” you can be sorry for the booboo, but happy to know that the little guy has knowledge about some basics of the English language.

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