1139: "This is a Wug": Experiments in Morphology Jan 21, 2018

Perhaps one of the most famous psycholinguist experiment is Jean Berko's "Wug Test". The experiment was very simple, and you can see it all in the photo attached; it presented children with a picture of a made-up thing called a 'wug', and then asked "there are two of them. There are two ______". It might seem obvious that the answer is 'wugs' (unless somehow someone were to think it were one of only a few strong nouns, making it something like 'wag') but the test showed that children understand the basics of linguistic morphology. Anecdotally, it is easy enough to see children say 'holded' instead of 'held', indicating that they memorize the morphology and not words on an individual basis, but using the invented word 'wug' meant that the children could not have heard the morphological change before taking the test, and therefore would not simply be repeating some adult. The test did not look at how 'wug' could also be made into a verb i.e. 'he wugs' as is possible with nouns in English, but nevertheless demonstrated that people, even children, don't need meaning to have grammatical sentences, which is an important idea in the theory of Universal Grammar. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.