Jean Berko's 'Wug' experiemnt.
During the experiment Berko was trying to show the contrast in an adult's responses to the relevant tense questions, compared to a young child's answers. The adult knew to convert the word 'wug' to 'wugette; because 'ette' is an established English word ending for an animal that is a smaller version of the fully grown animal. Therefore, the interviewee knew to make this modification to the word, even though 'wug' is an imaginary word. A child however, would not know to modify the word by adding letters to the end, for example 'ette', 'ling' or 'y'; instead labelled the image as a 'baby wug'.
No comments:
Post a Comment