Jean Berko’s wug experiment It was a true milestone in the history of psycholinguistics. By presenting artificial words to young children, Berko demonstrated that even very early in life we are able to extract rules from language and apply them to unfamiliar words.
In this article we will see what the context of the experiment was, how it was carried out and what exactly was discovered thanks to it.
Jean Berko was born in 1931 in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1958, after studying history, literature and linguistics, he received his doctorate from Harvard University with a study in the field of psycholinguistics which would be extremely influential for including the so-called “wug experiment”, which we will describe in detail in the following section.
Berko has spent most of his career at Boston University, where he worked as a professor until a few years ago. She is currently retired from this profession, although 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 work also includes research on vocabulary, aphasia, the acquisition of routines in children and the differences between mothers’ language. and that of the parents.
The Wug Experiment
In his most famous research, which would later be known as “the wug experiment,” Berko worked with girls and boys between 4 and 7 years old. Her goal was analyze the ability of children to understand the rules of language (specifically the addition of inflectional suffixes) and apply them to new words.
To do this, he showed the experimental subjects images of objects and activities to which artificial words had been given as names. The most famous example is that of the “wug”, a bluish being that looks vaguely similar to that of a bird; In this case, a single wug was shown first and then two identical drawings.
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 said “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 respond “wugs.”
In addition to plurals, Berko studied verbal conjugations (for example the simple past), possessives and other common declensions in the English language. With his experiment he showed that young children have already learned the rules of their native language and are able to use them in words they do not know.
He also found that at very early ages children can apply the rules to familiar words but not to pseudowords; From this he deduced that first the declensions of each word are learned separately and at a more advanced stage the ability to deduce linguistic patterns and apply them to new words
Implications for language acquisition
The wug experiment disproved the idea that language is acquired by imitating other people’s words and by the reinforcement obtained from saying them. At that time this hypothesis was defended by many learning theorists, particularly in the behaviorist orientation.
Since the children who participated in the experiment did not know the artificial words before the test, the fact that they were correct in inflecting 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 solidly established in the basis of scientific theory on 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 behavior.
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 injuries 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 either by the presence of stable grammatical errors or by the intentional omission of words to reduce speaking effort.
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 their sex: while boys gave more orders and reflected traditional gender roles to a greater extent, women adapted their speech to a greater extent to the characteristics of the child
Although Berko wanted to generalize these results to the language of mothers and fathers in general, the truth is that the experiment sample was made up of only 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 due to the influence of the cultural context in which they grow up. They particularly stand out his studies on “well-mannered” behaviors such as greeting, saying goodbye, thanking or apologizing.
