Children's learning of English morphologythe Wug Test 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. , , . 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 "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: •
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.) 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 singularplural 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 suggests that the order in which a language is learned is less important in predicting its retention than the thoroughness with which it is learned. }}
Psychophysiological responses to taboo words An unusual study carried out with Harris and Aycicegi, "
Taboo words and reprimands elicit greater autonomic reactivity in a first language than in a second language" (2003), investigated the involuntary
psychophysiological reactions of bilingual speakers to taboo words. Thirtytwo TurkishEnglish bilinguals judged the pleasantness of an array of words and phrases in
Turkish (their first language), and in English (their second), while their
skin conductance was monitored via fingertip electrodes. Participants manifested greater
autonomic arousal in response to taboo words and childhood reprimands in their first language than to those in their second language, confirming the commonplace claim that speakers of two languages are less uncomfortable speaking taboo words and phrases in their second language than in their native language.
Aphasia Gleason has also done significant research on
aphasia, a condition (usually due to
brain injury) in which a person's ability to understand and/or to produce language, including their ability to find the words they need and their use of basic morphology and syntax, is impaired in a variety of ways. In "Some Linguistic Structures in the Speech of a Broca's Aphasic" (1972) Gleason, Goodglass, Bernholtz, and Hyde discuss an experiment carried out with a man who, after a
stroke, had been left with
Broca's aphasia/
agrammatism, a specific form of aphasia typically impairing the production of morphology and syntax more than it impairs comprehension. This experiment employed the Story Completion Test (often used to probe a subject's capacity for producing various common grammatical forms) as well as free conversation and repetition to elicit speech from the subject; this speech was then analyzed to evaluate how well he used inflectional morphology (e.g. plural and past tense word endings) and basic syntax (the formation of, for example, simple
declarative,
imperative, and
interrogative sentences). To do this the investigator, in a few sentences, began a simple story about a pictured situation, then asked the subject to conclude the narrative. The stories were so designed that a nonlanguageimpaired person's response would typically employ particular structures, for example, the plural of a noun, the past tense of a verb, or a simple but complete yesno question (e.g. "Did you take my shoes?"). Gleason, Goodglass, Bernholtz, and Hyde concluded that the transition from verb to object was easier for this subject than was the transition from subject to verb and that
auxiliary verbs and verb
inflections were the parts of speech most likely to be omitted by the subject. There was considerable variation among consecutive repeat trials of the same test item, although responses on successive attempts usually came closer to those a normal speaker would have produced. The study concluded that the subject's speech was not the product of a stable abnormal grammar, and could not be accounted for by assuming that he was simply omitting words to minimize his effort in producing them{{refn of significant theoretical controversy at the time. ==Selected publications==