What’s a wug?
If I find a legitimate question in my askbox, it’s usually about what exactly is a wug. It comes from Mrs. Berko’s (now Dr. Gleason) paper on language development in children. Basically, she was trying to answer the question of how children grasped morphemes at certain ages. The most famous one, the namesake of the test, is a hypothetical wug. A child is shown the following image:
If you’re old enough to be reading this, you’ll easily say “wugs”. Notice the pronunciation: the “s” makes the /z/ sound. Since the child has never heard the word before, if he or she responds “correctly” as we determine it, that child has a grasp of the morpheme represented by “s” — the concept of plurality. This is opposed to just remembering that if there is one dog you say “dog” and if there are more you say “x dogs”.
I’m doing my senior research project on this test (it involves all sorts of morphemes, like one who is going to zib will be zibbing soon). I find it absolutely interesting. :D
If you do too, you can find the final product of my research here.
tl;dr — A wug isn’t a real thing. It’s a reference to linguistics.
now there is another one.
I'm 18 and I like wugs. Check the sidebar for all sorts of useful links and things.
