Jean Berko Gleason

Jean Berko Gleason is an American psycholinguist whose experiments helped establish how children acquire language. Her Wug Test demonstrated that children can apply grammatical rules to unfamiliar words.

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Roger Brown: An American psychologist whose studies of children’s speech helped establish modern research on language development. Brown’s work on children’s early grammar provides a close contemporary comparison to Gleason’s research.
Wug Test: An experiment testing whether children apply grammatical rules to invented words. This is Gleason’s best-known method for testing children’s productive knowledge of grammar.
Child language development: The development of speech, comprehension, and linguistic knowledge during childhood. Gleason’s research helps explain how grammatical abilities emerge as children learn language.
Generative grammar: An approach to linguistics that models the rules and structures underlying speakers’ sentences. The Wug Test offers experimental evidence about children’s ability to use grammatical rules productively.
Noam Chomsky: An American linguist whose theory of generative grammar transformed debates about the human capacity for language. Chomsky’s account of innate linguistic structure shaped the theoretical backdrop for research on children’s grammar.
Overregularization: The use of a regular grammatical pattern in a word that has an irregular form, as in “goed.” Children’s overregularizations show that they actively apply rules rather than merely repeat adult speech.
Language socialization: The process through which people learn language practices and social norms together. Gleason studied how interaction and social context shape children’s developing language.
Psycholinguistics: The study of the mental processes involved in producing, understanding, and learning language. Gleason’s experiments made children’s linguistic knowledge a subject of systematic psychological testing.
Eve V. Clark: A linguist known for research on how children learn word meanings and use language in context. Clark’s studies extend the developmental questions that Gleason investigated to lexical meaning and use.
Morphology: The study of word structure, including how roots and affixes combine to express grammatical information. The Wug Test probes children’s knowledge of morphological rules such as plural formation.