Jean Berko and the "wugs" experiment

The experiment of the wugs by Jean Berko It was a true milestone in the history of psycholinguistics. By presenting young children with artificial words, Berko demonstrated that even in stages very early in life we ​​are able to extract rules of language and apply them to words unknown.

In this article we will see what was the context of the experiment, how it was carried out and what exactly was discovered thanks to it.

• You may be interested in: "The Sapir-Whorf theory of language"

Biography of Jean Berko

Jean Berko was born in 1931 in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1958, after studying history, literature, and linguistics, she received her doctorate from Harvard University with a study in the field of psycholinguistics which would be extremely influential for including the so-called “wugs experiment”, which we will describe in detail in the next section.

Berko has spent most of her career at Boston University, where she worked as a faculty until a few years ago. She is currently retired from this profession, although he continues to dedicate himself to research in the field of psycholinguistics.

In addition to his studies and works on language development in the early stages of life, Berko's works also include She investigates vocabulary, aphasia, the acquisition of routines in children and the differences between the language of mothers and that of their children. parents.

• Related article: "The 12 types of language (and their characteristics)"

The wug experiment

In his most famous research, which would later be known as "the wug experiment", Berko worked with girls and boys between the ages of 4 and 7. His goal was analyze the ability of children to understand the rules of language (specifically adding inflectional suffixes) and applying them to new words.

To do this, he showed the experimental subjects images of objects and activities that had been given artificial words as names. The most famous example is that of the "wug", a bluish-colored being that looks vaguely similar to that of a bird; in this case a single wug was shown first and then two identical pictures.

The test itself consisted of presenting the children unfinished sentences that they had to complete by declining the pseudoword in question. The text that accompanied the first drawing of the wug read "This is a WUG"; under the image of the two wugs you could read “Here we have another WUG. Now there are two. We have two…". Children were expected to answer “wugs”.

In addition to plurals, Berko studied verb conjugations (for example, the past simple), possessives, and other habitual declensions in the English language. With his experiment, he showed that young children have already learned the rules of their mother tongue and are able to use them in words they do not know.

He further found that at very early ages children can apply the rules to familiar words but not to pseudowords; from this he deduced that in the first place the declensions of each word are learned separately and in a more advanced stage the ability to deduce linguistic patterns and apply them to new words.

• You may be interested in: "Noam Chomsky's theory of language development"

Implications for language acquisition

The wug experiment refuted the idea that language is acquired by imitating other people's words and by reinforcement from saying them. At that time this hypothesis was defended by many learning theorists, particularly in the behavioral orientation.

Since the children who participated in the experiment did not know the artificial words before the proof, the fact that they were correct in declining them necessarily implies that they knew the basic rules of their language. after Berko Other researchers generalized these results. to different languages ​​and contexts.

After its publication, the results of this experiment had a very significant influence on the study of language. Currently, Berko's findings are firmly established in the scientific theory of language acquisition.

Other contributions from Berko

The rest of Berko's research can also be included in psycholinguistics, although this author has shown interest in multiple facets of language and its broad influence on learning and conduct.

1. studies on aphasia

Aphasia is a disorder consisting of a very marked difficulty in the use of expressive and/or receptive language. It is generally due to brain lesions and its specific characteristics depend on the location of the damage, which is why multiple types of aphasia have been described.

Along with Goodglass, Bernholtz, and Hyde, Berko argued that the linguistic problems of aphasia cannot be explained or by the presence of stable grammatical errors or by the intentional omission of words to reduce the effort to talk.

• Related article: "Aphasias: the main language disorders"

2. Linguistic differences between mothers and fathers

In a 1975 study, Berko found that the interaction of adults with young children seemed to vary depending on of their sex: while men gave more orders and reflected gender roles to a greater extent traditional, women adapted their speech to a greater extent to the characteristics of the child.

Although she Berko wanted to generalize these results to the language of mothers and fathers in general, the truth is that the sample of the The experiment consisted only of three couples with children and four kindergarten teachers, two of them women and two men.

3. Acquisition of routines in childhood

Berko conceptualized routines as verbal patterns, sometimes accompanied by gestures, that young children internalize under the influence of the cultural context in which they grow up. They stand out particularly his studies on the behaviors "of good manners", such as greeting, saying goodbye, thanking or apologizing.