14/04/2024
Very interesting…
🐤 This is a wug.
🐤🐤 Now there are two of them. There are two ___.
You’ve just participated in one of the most famous linguistic experiments of all time, called the Wug Test.
When this study was conducted in 1958, linguists didn’t yet know whether children memorized plural forms of nouns on a case-by-case basis, or were learning a more general rule of adding “-s”.
Regular nouns like “cat” / “cats” and “dog” / “dogs” made it seem like they learn the general rule, but irregular nouns like “mouse” / “mice” and “man” / “men” made it seem like they memorize individual words.
But English plurals are more complicated than just adding an “-s”. That “-s” has three different pronunciations depending on the sound that comes before it:
after voiceless consonants → /s/
cat /kæt/ → cats /kæts/
cup /kʌp/ → cups /kʌps/
after voiced consonants → /z/
dog /dɑg/ → dogs /dɑgz/
bed /bɛd/ → beds /bɛdz/
after sibilants → /ɪz/ (with an extra vowel)
house /haᶷs/ → houses /haᶷsɪz/
“maze” /maᶦz/ → “mazes” → /maᶦzɪz/
This is a complex rule! Do children learn this rule, or do they just memorize individual plurals?
To test this, linguist Jean Berko Gleason created new words for toys (like the wug) and prompted children to give the plural form. This would check whether children could apply these rules to totally new words they had never heard before. If they did, that would demonstrate that children were in fact learning the rule rather then memorizing the plural for individual words.
Gleason found that children learned the above rules gradually, in the order /s/ > /z/ > /ɪz/. Young children couldn’t answer correctly, but by age 6 they could apply all the rules to words they had never encountered.
The coolest part? The order in which children acquire those different plural forms matches universal tendencies about language itself. Voiceless consonants like /s/ are much more common in the world’s languages than voiced consonants like /z/. Some languages don’t even have voiced consonants.
Further Reading: "The infinite gift: How children learn and unlearn the languages of the world"
https://amzn.to/3xsTuv5
Original Research Study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00437956.1958.11659661
