Ever Since I Was A Little Kid I Wanted To Be A Post Office

ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be a post office

More Posts from Schnilf and Others

3 years ago

"defend your thesis" why are you attacking my thesis

3 years ago

I have never stanned anyone as hard as I stan Zelenskiy

3 years ago

I like pointing my phone camera at my own legs in wide-angle mode and pretending to be a big spindly-legged giant that is very far up


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1 year ago

sleeping all day with a cold, barely able to breathe, too weak to get up, thinking to myself: I must be faking this to get out of work


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5 months ago

What is a ‘wug’?

If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?

The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:

What Is A ‘wug’?

“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.

Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) 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 (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) 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 (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), 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 ________.

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings‍—‌to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms‍—‌to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words‍—‌implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural 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 (and adults) 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.”

Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:

What Is A ‘wug’?
What Is A ‘wug’?
What Is A ‘wug’?

Sources: 

Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic

3 years ago
This Is Not The Most Relevant Of All The Criticisms I Have But It Is The Most Amusing

this is not the most relevant of all the criticisms I have but it is the most amusing


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3 years ago

tfw man in Kärnten aufwächst

tfw ich Bernd HĂścke zuhĂśren muss


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1 year ago
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D
Greens In Various Shapes And Forms :D

greens in various shapes and forms :D

3 months ago

sorry for romanticising the mundane. i have little else

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Bits from my life, occasional reblogs | Autumn: always-between-birches | Winter: burnt-almonds

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