Jean Berko Gleason
Jean Berko Gleason 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" being "so basic to what know and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins."
Biography
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, butAfter graduating from Cleveland Heights High School in 1949, Berko Gleason 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. 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 and Psycholinguistics. 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.
She has also served on the editorial boards of numerous academic and professional journals and was associate editor of Language from 1997 to 1999.
Gleason was profiled in Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Forty Women Whose Ideas Shape the Modern World.
A festschrift in her honor, Methods for Studying Language Production, was published in 2000.
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 from the International Association for the Study of Child Language.
Since 2007 she has delivered the "Welcome, welcome" and "Goodbye, goodbye" speeches at the annual Ig Nobel Awards ceremonies.
Selected research
Children's learning of English morphologythe Wug Test
Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research, 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:
Each "target" word was a made-up 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 is wugs has apparently inferred 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,
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 ________.
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 it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children 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:
According to Ratner and Menn, "As an enduring concept in psycholinguistic research, the wug has become generic, like or , 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 Testlike instruments be used in the diagnosis of learning disabilities, but in practice success in this direction has been limited.
Parent–child interactions
Another of Gleason's early papers "Fathers and Other Strangers: Men's Speech to Young Children" explored differences between mothers' and fathers' spoken interaction with their children, primarily using data produced by two female and two male daycare teachers at a large university, and by three mothers and three fathers, mostly during family dinners.Among other conclusions, this study found that:
- mothers used less complex constructions in speaking to their children than did fathers;
- mothers generated lengthier and more complex constructions in speaking to their eldest child than to their younger children;
- fathers issued significantly more commands than did mothers, along with more threats and more teasing in the way of namecalling; and
- the fathers' language also reflected traditional gender roles in the families.
Differences included that the male teachers tended to address the children by name more often than did the female teachers and that the male teachers issued more imperatives than did the female teachers.
Acquisition of routines in children
Gleason's research eventually extended into the study of children's acquisition of routinesthat is, standardized chunks of language that the culture expects of everyone, such as greetings, farewells, and expressions of thanks. Gleason was one of the first to study the acquisition of politeness, examining English-speaking children's use of routines such as thank you, please, and I'm sorry. Researchers in this area have since studied both verbal and non-verbal routinization, and the development of politeness routines in a variety of cultures and languages.The Halloween routine
Gleason's 1976 paper with Weintraub, "The Acquisition of Routines in Child Language",analyzed performance on the culturally standardized Halloween trick-or-treat routine in 115 children aged two to sixteen years.
Alterations in ability and the function of parental contribution were analyzed concerning cognitive and social components.
They discovered that in the acquisition of routines
parents' major interest is for their children to achieve accurate performance, with little stress on children's understanding of what they are expected to say.
Gleason and Weintraub found that the parents rarely if ever explain to children the meaning of such routines as Bye-bye or Trick or treatthere was no concern with the child's thoughts or intentions as long as the routine was performed as expected at the appropriate times.
Thus, parents' role in the acquisition of routines is very different from their role in most of the rest of language development.