If youâve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word âwugâ somewhere. But what exactly is a âwugâ and where does this come from?
The âwugâ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called âwug testâ by Jean Berko Gleason. Hereâs an illustration from her test:
âGleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge childrenâs acquisition of morphological rulesâââfor example, the âdefaultâ rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hatâhats, eyeâeyes, witchâwitches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:
This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.
Each âtargetâ word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wĘgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since âwugâ ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.
The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. âA man who âzibsâ is a ________?â), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. âWhy is a birthday called a birthday?â Other items included:
This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.
This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.
(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)
Gleasonâs major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endingsâââto produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other formsâââto nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense wordsâââimplying that children start by memorizing singularâplural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.
The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is "almost universalâ for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.â
Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:
Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic
vaporwave
izzy806
prguitarman
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
