Dreaming up languages… What does our good friend and Secret Lifer Jean Berko Gleason have to do with Disney’s big-budget fantasy “John Carter”? The invention of fake languages, of course! This TIME magazine article shows how her famous “wug” experiments informed the work of those inventing Thark, the imaginary language used on Mars in “John Carter” and Na’vi, the language used by the inhabitants of Pandora in “Avatar.” In lieu of residuals, we say “oe irayo si ngaru” (Na’vi for “I give thanks to you”) to Jean for helping Hollywood discover the beauty of imaginary languages!

Jean Berko Gleason drives faster than we think!

But she never EVER breaks any laws. Jean drives us crazy!

NEVER.

And besides that, she’s our favorite psycholinguist/speed demon ever.

So if you’re in NYC on June 2 at 8 PM, you should go see her speak at the World Science Festival. Jean is great “live” and we promise she won’t disappoint. The website also says something about cocktails…. do with that information what you will.

The lovely Jean Berko Gleason has made it into the headlines as of late, addressing the talking twins video that recently went viral on YouTube. Gleason said that although the twins were communicating through gestures, they weren’t actually talking, but “jargon babbling,” a kind of very expressive babbling. Whatever it was, it captured the rapt attention of nearly four million viewers, including me.

My favorite part of the Jean Berko Gleason videos was when she recalled letting loose on her parents with some good old-fashioned gibberish. ”It must mean something in some language,” was her response when they told her it meant nothing.

I hear ya, Jean.

“Ugga da bugga” may not be in the dictionary yet, but don’t count it out. Unlike some of our more rigid counterparts (cough, French Academy), we English-speakers update our language as much as we do our social networking sites. There are currently 1,007,711 words in the English language, and a Perhaps Ugga Da Bugga is something in horse-speak? new word is created every 98 minutes. That adds up to 14.7 words per day (according to the Global Language Monitor, which–full disclosure–is a bit more lenient than Mr. Webster). Some are the results of new technology. Others are cultural hybrids that fuse two languages. Each year, new words like “locavore,” “interweb,” and “frenemy” make the transition from crazy talk to real, live word. But each one got started somewhere.

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.

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.

Maybe it was the proximity of a camera, or all those lights, but I found myself thinking a bit harder than a 24 year-old adult should when I took the Wug test with Jean. Thankfully, we native English speakers don’t usually have to think about the mechanics of our rather convoluted language. That’s because we already know it. If we do stop and think about it, though, we see that English has so many exceptions to the rules, so many options. It makes me pity those poor toddlers who have no choice but to take on the task of mastering the English language.

But this blog-maker can safely say that she is a satisfactory English-talker and test-taking lady.

Today’s guest blogger is Brian L. Cansler, a linguistics student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As most people familiar with Jean Berko Gleason’s work know, the correct answer to the question in the image caption would usually be “Wugs,” pronounced with a final [z] sound. In this case, however, there’s something special about these particular Wugs. Does the picture give it away?

This is a Wug. Now there are two of them. There are two ___. (The Wug and Wug Test ©Jean Berko Gleason 2006. All rights reserved. For individual & family use only) The first Wug is permanently tattooed on my forearm, and the second Wug is tattooed on my friend Halley’s wrist. As you can imagine, she and I would fill in that blank a bit differently. For us and for countless other linguists around the world, Jean single-handedly created the patron saint of linguistics: the irresistibly cute Wug. (As an aside, not all linguists are branded for life with a Wug. We’re just a bit…enthusiastically dedicated.)

Throughout the entirety of her career, Jean has been making great strides in the fields of linguistics and psychology, and she’s one of the key figures who has helped bridge the gap between the two disciplines. As you’ve surely heard by now, Jean is no stranger to speed; this is mirrored in her fast-paced career. She published a paper early in her career that helped catapult her as close to academic stardom as one could hope to be fresh out of grad school: “The Child’s Learning of English Morphology,” better known as Berko 1958. It was with this paper that Jean undeniably revolutionized the study of language acquisition.

Jean’s Wug test was the first to prove that young children analyze the words around them with innate mental structures and, as if by magic, find complicated rules in this chaotic mess—and actually understand them! This was one of those monumental discoveries that laid the foundation for the modern study of linguistics.

Well, that, and it gave linguists everywhere a common motto to rally under: “This is a Wug.”

Soon after I interviewed Jean for our series—and quite unrelated to Jean and SLOSE—I decided to finally join Facebook. And amongst a slew of reconnections with high school friends, long-lost cousins and childhood acquaintances, I “friended” Jean Berko Gleason. I don’t befriend everyone we interview on SLOSE, but I liked Jean a lot. She’s the kind of “young-minded” wise person who is always worth having in your life.

Since I live in California and most of our SLOSE folks are back East, phone meetings and interviews tend to mean I have to get up earlier than usual. But not for Jean. We had our phone interviews late at night for me and even later for her. Jean is a night owl. We’d talk at 9:00 pm my time and go on for 45 minutes. And Jean was just as fresh at 1:00 am, as I was wiped out by 10:00 pm.

Much of our treasured Jean Berko Gleason’s work around language acquisition has, of course, centered around children. So to follow up, we thought you might also enjoy this article about kids and irony.

And for better or worse, there’s no way we could resist this one:

What’s the fastest Jean Berko Gleason has ever driven?

The answer is in the title for this post!

If you cross her, Jean Berko Gleason will PASS you! Now Jean certainly doesn’t recommend 111 mph as a typical cruising speed when you’re driving to the grocery store.

And she would never encourage any kind of illegal activities.

And she understands that she’s a role model for America’s youth.

So kids, do remember to say “hi,” “thanks,” and “goodbye.” But for the love of everything that’s decent in the world, do NOT drive 111 mph!

Still, the fastest Jean’s ever driven is indeed 111 mph.

And she knows this because her GPS told her it was so.

We love Jean very, very much.

We felt compelled to ask Jean about this photo of herself that we came across while doing research.

Says Jean: “My friends and I in graduate school (late 50’s) went up to Crane Beach in Ipswich, Mass., to have some fun. So they buried me and we took pictures of my head looking chopped off, as you see. Actually, you get a new perspective on yourself when you see your disembodied head like that. The friends all got their degrees and went on to distinguished careers.”

Now, more than ever, it makes sense that Jean’s favorite language is Sand-skrit.

Jean stated there are gender differences in language. I agree.

My friends with daughters had lengthy, tell-all conversations and clothing discussions for hours at a time. Coming from a family that told everything to everybody, I was perplexed by my own less than forthcoming offspring—both boys. Sure, they’d casually hint at something important, but pry as I might, I only collected the smallest bits of information.

They’ll hear you if you stand next to them & feed them. Then one day I read a magazine article—not a scientific journal by any means. The article said conversations with girls should be conducted face to face, while conversations with boys should be side by side. As an urban high school teacher, I had lots of out-in-the hall conversations with boys. So I’d lean against the wall next to them and ask away. They answered!

Automatic side-by-side conversations with my sons evolved from our drives to and from sports practices. I loved it and looked forward to the time we spent together—until they could drive.

As you know by now, our current scientist, Jean Berko Gleason, likes to drive fast, really really fast. Can you guess her all-time high speed? Post your guesses in the comments and we’ll give you the answer later this week.

And to get you in the mood, here’s the original Japanese intro to a show that can in retrospect be viewed as an homage to our beloved Jean. It’s a little something we like to call “Speed Racer”!

“For if at any time there can be an excuse for the rashness of a Woman who ventures to aspire to the subtleties of a science, which knows no bounds, not even those of infinity itself, it certainly should be at this glorious period, in which a Woman reigns…”—Marian Gaetana Agnesi’s dedication of her book “Analytical Institutions” to Maria Theresa, empress of the Austrian empire, in 1748.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi, polyglot and mathematician Like Jean Berko Gleason, psycholinguist (and speed demon!), the enigmatic Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) was a walking polyglot. Maria could speak both French and Italian at age five, and by age twelve, she spoke Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, and Latin. But Maria, whose name is attached to a mathematical curve called “The Witch of Agnesi,” is known for her contributions to mathematics. At age eleven, Maria wrote and read, in Latin, her own appeal for women’s right to education and to what she would later call, in the introduction of her landmark book on mathematics, “the sublime sciences.”

Maria Gaetana Agnesi grew up in a wealthy, noble family. At the invitation of her father, scholars regularly gathered at her home, and in the harpsichord salon she dazzled them with talk about the ways of the tides and the origins of spring waters. They talked of light, color, geometry, and the human soul. Afterward, the Agnesi family and guests wound down over fruit-flavored ices while Maria’s sister played the harpsichord and sang arias.

Jean wasn’t kidding—she really did title one of her research papers “Hi, thanks and goodbye.” It was published in 1980, in a scholarly journal called “Language in Society.”

She wanted to know how mothers and fathers might play a role in their children learning the politeness routines of—you guessed it—saying “hi,” “thank you,” and “bye-bye.”

If you don’t wave, you’ll be despised. Jean’s experiment was sort of…sneaky. She had 22 toddlers (aged 2 to 5 years) visit her lab twice, once with mom and once with dad. Each time, the parent and child would play for 30 minutes while the researchers secretly videotaped the interaction. Then, at the end of each session, a research assistant entered the room and nonchalantly asked the child a series of scripted questions.

Let’s call the assistant Julie and the child Johnny. The script went like this:

Julie: Hi, I’m Julie. Hi, Johnny. (Pause.)

Julie: Here’s a gift for you for today’s visit. (Pause.)

(Casual conversation.)

Julie: Goodbye, Johnny. (Pause.)

Later, the researchers poured through the tapes and counted how many times the children responded with the expected, polite response. The data may surprise you.

I have to admit, I didn’t have a clue what a wug was. Someone gave me a general psychology book some time ago (I don’t know why, I’m not a psychologist), so I did a quick bit of research and it turns out that a wug is a very interesting creature indeed. When shown a picture of a wug (like the one Jean showed us), small children involved in the experiment are told “This is a wug.” Next, the children are shown two such creatures and asked “what do you see?” Wug is the loneliest number that you’ve ever heard. (The Wug and Wug Test ©Jean Berko Gleason 2006. All rights reserved. For individual & family use only)

Interestingly, a lot of the very young children say that they see two “wugs,” thus demonstrating that they can use grammatical rules (such as plurals) which they could not possibly have learned yet. Wugs are great!

All this talk of language made me think of a recent scientific paper in which Catherine Snow of Harvard suggested that in order for science to be taught better, we should first teach children “academic language.” This language, from my point of view, is the language of cramming as much information into as few words as possible.

I’m not sure if this is the best way to go about teaching science or any other subject for that matter. Sometimes, it is best to expound on a topic and embellish concrete scientific facts with a beautiful turn of phrase or a nicely constructed simile. We shouldn’t get too bogged down in the “language” of science; the important thing is to get the message across. However, if we try and teach science in an “academic language” we may end up sucking all the fun out of it. And the wugs would not like that!

As you probably know by now, psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason has a thing for driving fast cars quickly. What you might not know is that she has a long history of being photographed with them too.

This first picture was taken when Jean was a graduate student in the late ‘50s, and her proximity to the car has more to do with the way the car looks than with what’s under the hood.

“The car belonged to a friend,” says Jean. “And I think we took the picture just because it looked good. I am not a Volkswagen fan, never owned one, and wouldn’t want one. I could never understand what people saw in an underpowered little car with no heat. Sorry. I really don’t like them. But I do usually take pictures of myself with my cars, and, as you see, with other people’s as well.”

Following the Volkswagen photo (and after the cut), we present a collage of Jean with some of the cars she did actually like over the years.

Jean and the Volkswagen look good, but there was no love between them

“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.

Although I only met her for the first time when she rolled into our studio, Jean Berko Gleason is my neighbor. In fact, she lives about a fifteen-minute walk from my house. So when we needed to get some video footage of Jean driving her beloved Subaru WRX, I was clearly the man for the job.

Jean and her WRX, both luminous and just right When I arrived at Jean’s house she immediately plied me with some mango lemonade (delicious, just as she’d promised), and we talked about “Mad Men” (“you’ve got to remember,” she said, “that show is about my time”). Jean may be a Professor Emerita, but that must mean the literal translation of “Emerita” is “incredibly busy with about a thousand projects, many of which relate to psycholinguistics and some of which don’t.” Jean doesn’t teach anymore, but she told me she gets new ideas for research just about every day. And she continues to do that research and to publish new papers. We’d all be doing well if we were nearly as awake to the world as Jean Berko Gleason.

Jean did, however, have one piece of bad news to share with me. Her WRX is, of course, a manual shift transmission, because that’s way more fun than an automatic and because it helps her drive fast… um, efficiently. But Jean told me she’s now thinking she might have to switch to an automatic transmission. “Ah,” I thought, “she must be slowing down. Managing the stick shift and the clutch isn’t as easy as it used to be.” Of course, I was wrong. The reason Jean’s switching to an automatic? None of her younger friends knows how to drive a stick, and she’d like to be able to share the driving with them on road trips. I should have known better. The only reason Jean would ever slow down is to let everyone else catch up.

Jean Berko Gleason is ready to answer your questions. And everyone who uses the words “hi,” “thanks,” and “goodbye” goes to the front of the line!

Ask Jean your questions in the Comments section.

UPDATE: We are no longer taking more questions for Jean. But check out her answers in the comments. She may have answered a question you were going to ask!