The wug test, created by Boston University professor Jean Berko Gleason in 1958, assesses a child’s ability to learn morphemes associated with making plural nouns or past tense verbs. The test uses imaginary scenarios and flashcards to evaluate a student’s understanding of linguistic allomorphs, including “Z,” “S,” and “tZ.” The test also measures a student’s ability to form derived adjectives and possessive nouns. The wug test is part of the field of morphology, which analyzes the phonetic units of words and parts of speech.
Boston University is home to psycholinguistics professor Jean Berko Gleason, who created the wug test in 1958 as a linguistic tool to test how well children had learned the so-called “morphemes” associated with making plural nouns or past tense verbs. This process involves showing a child a series of imaginary scenarios – like the first, one “wug” becoming two “wugs” – and then analyzing how well he pronounces the three “allomorphic” sounds needed for plurality: “Z, “S ” and “tZ.” This test also assesses other types of morpheme learning, such as how well a student really learned the correct way to make past tense verbs or nouns possessive.
The three linguistic allomorphs for making nouns plural are the main thrust of the wug test. The first sound, “Z,” is similar to the sound of “glasses” or “computer.” The allomorph “S” is also as it sounds, like “rats” or “docks”. Finally, the “tZ” sound is the thinnest, following sibilant sounds, as in “forces” or “stores”.
Primarily younger school-age children are shown a series of 27 flashcards and asked a series of questions about them. Because the pictures are depictions of imaginary animals with made-up names, it’s impossible for children to make the word plural, past perfect, or possessive correctly just because they may have learned to conjugate that particular word before. For example, with the first card the examiner says to a student: “This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two. There are two ______.” The student can only fill that void with appropriate sounding “wugs” if she has truly learned what kind of words get this kind of treatment.
The wug test progresses through several types of allomorphs. Some questions test the ability to enter certain types of verbs in the past tense. Another flashcard shows a man holding a strange-looking object. “This is a man who knows how to cheat,” says the examiner. “He’s screwing. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday?” The child is expected to respond, “Yesterday, he was joking.”
A different type of wug test question measures how well a student can form a derived adjective. This card shows a dog covered in green spots. “This is a dog with quirks. It’s all covered in weirdness. What kind of dog is it? It’s a dog.” The student’s answer should be “extravagant”.
The wug test is one of several tests that teachers can use to test a student’s mastery of phonics skills. All of these types of exams are part of a field called morphology. Students in this field study and analyze the different morphemes, or basic phonetic units, of various words and parts of speech to find commonalities and anomalies. Professor Berko Gleason fully explains each wug test flashcard in The Child’s Learning of English Morphology, which is available online.
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