A Wug Defines Efficient Driving

I have long known that Jean Berko Gleason is the linguist who created the Wug Test (pictured and described below); what I didn't know is that she has given an accurate label and definition to my preferred style of driving. Check out this wonderful video clip from The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers. Jean Berko Gleason is my new idol.



And for those who have not met a wug:

“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!

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.

-Jean Berko Gleason

From PBS The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers

A Humorous Look at Language Acquisition

I recently spotted this hilarious look at the babbling phase of language acquisition on Language Log and I still can't stop laughing. What a great way to relieve stress.

I've just been informed that the video has been removed so here is a link to the video on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1254261195230

Spotted this at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2605

Obama's Name Wins Election Thanks to Language Acquisition

From a linguistic point of view it makes perfect sense that Obama won the election. The name Obama is easier and more natural to say than the name McCain. The reason the name Obama seems to roll right off the tongue so naturally is that the sounds and sound patterns in his name are consistent with some of the first sounds and patterns children make when they are acquiring language. In other words, we have known these sounds and patterns longer than any others.

Beyond crying, some of the first sounds a baby makes are cooing sounds which are basically vowel sounds, for example: ooh, aah, and eeh. Obama has three separate vowel sounds compared to McCain's one.

The next step in language acquisition is babbling which consists of repeated consonant vowel combinations (CVCV), for example: mama, dada, and baba. In linguistics the repeation of sounds and structures is called reduplication. Thus it can be said that Obama has a reduplicative name, in fact the last two syllables of his name sound an awful lot like a baby's babbling (O - bama).

And finally, when it comes to the acquisition of consonant sounds, those that are most commonly acquired first are: b, d, m, n and h. The only consonants in Obama's name are included in the list of consonant sounds that are known to be acquired early (O - BaMa).

With this linguistic analysis of Obama's name in mind (the many vowel sounds, the consonant sounds that are acquired early and the pattern of reduplication), it is no wonder Obama won the election.