Jean Berko Gleason

Jean Berko Gleason (born 1931) is an American psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions.

Gleason created the Wug Test, in which a child is shown pictures with nonsense names and then prompted to complete statements about them, and used it to demonstrate that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology.

Menn and Ratner have written that "Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research", the "wug" (one of the imaginary creatures Gleason drew in creating the Wug Test) being "so basic to what [psycholinguists] know and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins."

Jean Berko was born to Hungarian immigrant parents in Cleveland, Ohio.

As a child, she has said, "I was under the impression that whatever you said meant something in some language."

Her older brother's cerebral palsy made it difficult for most people to understand his speech, but

"I was the person who always understood what he said. So I felt some closeness with language as well as with my brother... I didn't start out to study psycholinguistics; I started out to study a million languages because I love them... Norwegian, French, Russian, bits and pieces of Arabic, German, [and] enough Spanish to get dinner."

After graduating from Cleveland Heights High School in 1949, Berko Gleason (then yet Berko) earned a B.A. in history and literature from Radcliffe College, then an M.A. in linguistics, and a combined Ph.D. in linguistics and psychology, at Harvard; from 1958 to 1959 she was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT.

In graduate school she was advised by Roger Brown, a founder in the field of child language acquisition.

Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children's acquisition of morphological rulesfor example, the "default" rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an, , or sound depending on the final consonant, e.g. hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches.

A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity,

with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

Each "target" 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 (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since "wug" 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. "A man who 'zibs' is a ________?"),

and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. "Why is a birthday called a birthday?"

Other items included:

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason's major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endingsto produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other formsto 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 wordsimplying that children start by memorizing singular–plural 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 universal" 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.

The Wug Test's fundamental role in the development of psycholinguistics as a discipline has been mapped by studying references to Gleason's work in "seminal journals" in the field, many of which carried articles referencing it in their founding issues:

"A review of citation lists [for Gleason's paper] over the years gives an interesting mini-view of the evolution of developmental psycholinguistics... In the first 15 years following publication, the article was extensively cited by researchers attempting to validate its utility and extend its finding to nontypical populations. Over time, however... the fact that almost any human being can do that task... became much less interesting than the question of how it is accomplished."

According to Ratner and Menn, "As an enduring concept in psycholinguistic research, the wug has become generic, like [kleenex] or [xerox], a concept so basic to what we know and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins... Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research."

It has been proposed that Wug Test–like instruments be used in the diagnosis of learning disabilities, but in practice success in this direction has been limited.

In January 1959 she married Harvard mathematician Andrew Gleason; they had three daughters.

Most of Berko Gleason's professional career has been at Boston University, where she served as Psychology Department chair and director of the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics; Lise Menn and Harold Goodglass were among her collaborators there.

She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Stanford University, and at the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Although officially retired and no longer teaching, she to be involved in research.

Gleason is the author or co-author of some 125 papers on language development in children, language attrition, aphasia, and gender and cultural aspects of language acquisition and use; and is editor/coeditor of two widely used textbooks, The Development of Language (first edition 1985, ninth edition 2016) and Psycholinguistics (1993).

She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Psychological Association, and was president of the International Association for the Study of Child Language from 1990 to 1993, and of the Gypsy Lore Society 1996 to 1999.

Gleason was profiled in Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Forty Women Whose Ideas Shape the Modern World (1996).

She has also served on the editorial boards of numerous academic and professional journals and was associate editor of Language from 1997 to 1999.

A festschrift in her honor, Methods for Studying Language Production, was published in 2000.

Since 2007 she has delivered the "Welcome, welcome" and "Goodbye, goodbye" speeches at the annual Ig Nobel Awards ceremonies.

In 2016 she received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Washington & Jefferson College for her work as "a pioneer in the field of psycholinguistics",

and in 2017 the Roger Brown Award (recognizing "outstanding contribution to the international child language community") from the International Association for the Study of Child Language.