Jean Berko and the experiment of the "wugs".

This curious experiment showed that very young children are capable of learning language rules.

Jean Berko's wugs experiment was a real milestone in the history of psycholinguistics. was a real milestone in the history of psycholinguistics. By presenting artificial words to young children, Berko demonstrated that even at very early stages of life we are able to extract language rules and apply them to unfamiliar words.

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

Biography of Jean Berko

Jean Berko was born in 1931 in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1958, after studying history, literature and linguistics, she received her Ph.D. from Harvard University with a study in the field of psycholinguistics. which would prove to be extremely influential because it included the so-called "wug experiment", which we will describe in detail in the following section.

Berko has spent most of her career at Boston University, where she worked as a lecturer until a few years ago. She is now retired from this profession, although she continues to be involved in research. continues to engage in research in the field of psycholinguistics in the field of psycholinguistics.

In addition to her 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' and fathers' language.

The wugs experiment

In his most famous research, which later became known as the "wug experiment," Berko worked with girls and boys between the ages of 4 and 7. His aim was to to analyze the children's ability to understand the rules of language (specifically the (specifically the addition of inflectional suffixes) and apply them to new words.

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

The test itself consisted of presenting the children with unfinished sentences to be unfinished sentences that they had to complete by declining the pseudoword in question. in question. The text accompanying the first drawing of the wug read "This is a WUG"; under the image of the two wugs it read "Here is another WUG. Now there are two. We have two...". The children were expected to answer "wugs".

In addition to plurals Berko studied verb conjugations (e.g. past simple), possessives and other common declensions in the English language. His experiment 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 further found that at a very early age 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 is acquired to deduce linguistic patterns and apply them to new words..

Implications for language acquisition

The Wug experiment refuted the idea that language is acquired by imitation of other people's words and by the reinforcement obtained by saying them. At the time this hypothesis was advocated 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 got the declension right necessarily implies that they knew the basic rules of their language. After Berko other researchers generalized these results to different languages and contexts. to different languages and contexts.

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

Other contributions by Berko

The rest of Berko's research can also be included in psycholinguistics, although she has been interested 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 marked difficulty in the use of expressive and/or receptive language.. It is usually due to brain lesions and its specific characteristics depend on the location of the damage, so that multiple types of aphasia have been described.

Along with Goodglass, Bernholtz and Hyde, Berko argued that the linguistic problems of aphasia can be explained neither by the presence of stable grammatical errors nor by the intentional omission of words to reduce effort in speaking.

2. Linguistic differences between mothers and fathers

In a 1975 study Berko found that adults' interactions with young children appeared to vary according to their sex: while males gave more commands and reflected traditional gender roles to a greater extent, females adapted their speech to a greater extent to the characteristics of the child, women were more likely to adapt their speech to the characteristics of the child..

Although Berko wanted to generalize these results to the language of mothers and fathers in general, the fact is that the experimental sample consisted of only three couples with children and four nursery school 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 through the influence of the cultural context in which they grow up. Particularly noteworthy are his studies on "polite" behaviors, such as greetings, goodbyessuch as greeting, saying goodbye, thanking or apologizing.