Jean Berko Gleason

Jean Berko Gleason is a Professor Emerita in the psychology department at the Boston University, a psycholinguist who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent-child interactions. She is best known for creating the wug test,^[1] by which she demonstrated that even young children have implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology, and which remains in use today.

Biography

With Andrew Gleason, 1958

Jean Berko was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Hungarian immigrant parents. She graduated from Cleveland Heights High School in 1949, then received an A.B. in history and literature, an A.M. in linguistics, and a combined PhD in linguistics and psychology, all from Radcliffe. In graduate school she was advised by Roger Brown, a pioneer in the field of child language acquisition. In January 1959 she married Harvard mathematician Andrew Gleason; they had three daughters.

Gleason spent most of her professional career at Boston University, where she served as Psychology department chair and director of the Graduate Program in Human Development. 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.

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. She has been active in the Gypsy Lore Society, and was its president from 1996 to 1999. She has also served on the editorial boards of numerous academic and professional journals, and was associate editor of Language. She is editor or co-editor of two widely used textbooks, The Development of Language (1985) and Psycholinguistics (1993).

Gleason was one of the profiled in Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Forty Women Whose Ideas Shape the Modern World (1996).^{[ 2]} A festschrift in her honor, Methods for Studying Language Production, was published in 2000.

For several years she has delivered the "Welcome, welcome" and "Goodbye, goodbye" speeches at the annual Ig Nobel Awards ceremonies.^{[ 3]}

Wug test

As part of her dissertation research^{[ 4]} Gleason devised the wug test, in which a young child is shown simple pictures of imaginary creatures and activities, and asked to complete statements about them. For example:

• Here is a wug. Now in this picture, there are two of them. There are two ________.
• Here is a gutch. Now in this picture, there are two of them. There are two ________.
• 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 ________.

Gleason found that young children are able to attach appropriate endings to these and other nonsense words—​which they had never before heard—​to form plurals, tenses, and other basic morphological forms. This implies that rather than simply imitating, children turn what they hear into patterns and rules, which they subsequently apply to novel words.

Gleason's findings are considered central to the understanding of how and when children achieve important language milestones. Her resulting paper ("The Child's Learning of English Morphology") remains basic to collections of readings in language development and cognitive psychology, and variations on the wug test are still used throughout the world to research children's language acquisition.

Select publications

References