Hi! Welcome to the first video in a series
I will be calling
“do you even linguistics?”
In this series I'm going to be talking about
various linguistics topics
from “where does verb conjugation
come from?” to “who’s Noam Chomsky?”
But first, I’d like to present myself.
My name is Eric Borja.
I’m 24 years old.
I am from the city of Rancho Cucamonga located in
Southern California.
I graduated from California State University, Northridge
I majored in linguistics
I've had a huge passion for the field of linguistics, I love it so much
Actually when I graduated, I got this tattoo right here
This is called a wug.
and a lot of people ask what it means exactly
So in this preliminary, I’m going to talk about what is a wug
In the 50’s there was much debate about
how children learn language.
The main school of thought was that children
memorized language.
They hear what their parents say and then
repeat it.
Mommy says apple so I say apple.
Nobody says eated, so I won’t say eated.
This is how language was learned.
In 1958, the psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason
at Boston University devised an experiment
that would change the field of linguistics
forever.
Dr. Gleason wanted to see how children reacted
to words they had never seen before
words that it would be impossible that they had memorized
She gathered some children around and showed
them a picture of a wug.
She said “this is a wug”.
Now there are two of them.
There are two ____.
And all the children said “wugs.”
Now, notice that it’s not that the child
just “added an S”
as people may want to oversimplify it.
No, if that were the case, the children would
have said “wugsss”
instead of“wugzzz”
Another animal that was used was called a
gutch.
Instead of just adding an S to the plural calling it “gutchsss”
the children all said “gutches.”
Now, we can also look at, for example, cat
The plural of cat is "catsss" and not catzzz"
In fact, what this experiment showed was that
children internalize unconscious rules for pluralization.
It’s not that they just “add an S” but
rather they add a s sound z sound or iz sound
depending on what the word ends in:
something that the written language does not
account for.
In fact, most speakers are unaware of this
distinction.
This experiment helped pave the way of our
current thinking about language.
The wug, the symbol for linguists
everywhere
was born out of a need to change the paradigm
of linguistic thought.
Thanks to Dr. Gleason, we now know that children,
rather than memorizing,
learn patterns for language.
They internalize these rules totally unconsciously.
How many of you actually noticed that there
were various sounds that end plural markers?
Pretty interesting, isn't it?
If you liked this video or have linguistics
questions, like or leave a comment below.
I’ll be posting videos weekly.
I’m Eric Borja and that is how you linguistics.
