This is a Wug

Today is a day of new things. 

A new university.

A new degree.

A new blog.

I have begun my "Master of Speech Language Pathology" at Sydney University, having completed my undergraduate degrees in Neuroscience and Linguistics at UNSW last year. I always intended to become a researcher, but over the years several of my subjects have awakened a huge interest in language development and disorder. In particular, my course in Psycholinguistics piqued my interest and I began to learn more about the link between language and the brain. I did not choose the Wug Life. It chose me.

But what is a Wug?

Image Source: http://i.imgur.com/4dt56.png

In 1958, Jean Berko invented the "Wug Test" as a means for determining whether a child has generalised the morphological rules of grammar of the language around them. She did this by inventing nonsense words (e.g. "Wug"), and asking the children questions that would lead them to supply a missing word (e.g. "Wugs") demonstrating their in/ability to apply general rules to words they had never heard before. If the child says there are two "Wugs", it shows they have learnt the general principle of pluralisation using -s. If Berko had used real words, she could not have been sure that the child had not simply learnt word-specific pairing of singular and plural forms.

The Wug and Wug Test © Jean Berko Gleason 2006. All rights reserved. 
For individual and family use only. Commercial use prohibited.

In Berko's original paper, she tested 27 different nonsense words (including "Wug", "Spow", "Rick"and "Niz"), analysing the child's ability to apply grammatical rules to several parts of speech. This included pluralisation, past tense formation, 3rd person singular conjugation, singular and plural possessive, adjective derivation and compound word analysis.

Berko found that children were able to apply general grammatical principles at a far younger age than previously supposed. This was the first experimental proof that children were able to derive systematic grammatical rules from simply being exposed to language, without being explicitly taught.

In the process, Berko had invented a useful tool for testing language development in children, and language impairment in disability, as well as an incredibly cute graphic.

Welcome to the Wug Life.