So let’s talk about lists. We all make lists sometimes, to help us remember what to buy,
or who to call, or to not forget the names of all our cousins. But when it comes to picking
up a language, how much of it is just making vast lists of everything that we hear? And
do little kids form different kinds of lists than adults do? If we want to find out answers
to these questions, it turns out, all you need is wug. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this
is The Ling Space.
So there’s no question: there’s a lot of memorization that goes into learning a
language. Whether you’re acquiring your first language as a baby, or if it’s your
second or third or seventh time rolling up all that linguistic goodness, there’s always
a big list of things you need to pick up. We all have some knowledge about how languages
can work in our heads already. Universal Grammar gives us a skeleton to weave the tendons and
sinews of our target language around. But there’s still just a lot of things that
come down to filling out and storing lists in our brain.
So what kinds of lists? We need to get lists of anything in our language that’s arbitrary -
so, anything that doesn’t have a deep reason for being one way, and not another.
That includes things like phonemes, or what sounds really matter for the language that
you’re learning. Languages divide up their possible set of sounds differently, and every
time you learn a new one, you need to learn a new way of mapping particular sound waves
to categories in the mind.
There’s no fundamental reason to divide [i] from [ɪ] in English, but not in Turkish
or Spanish, for example. Or to divide [b] from [p] in French and Thai, but not in English
and Irish. English has a different list of phonemes from Yucatec Maya or Nepali or Sesotho.
And learning any of those languages means you need to memorize what matters and what
doesn’t.
But the biggest thing of all that we need to memorize when we learn a new language are
the words, or more specifically, the morphemes, those smallest pairings of sound and meaning.
We don’t come into the world knowing how to say anything in our languages. We have
to pick up all those meaning bits. If you look at a word like “rainbow,” there’s
nothing inherent to a rainbow that means that it has to be called a rainbow.
If there were, it wouldn’t get pronounced arc-en-ciel in French, 虹 [nidʒi] in Japanese,
or bahaghari in Tagalog. It might seem to a native English speaker that [ɹejnbo:] is
the only appropriate word for that colorful watery sky phenomenon. But other languages
do just fine using very, very different sounding words to express that meaning. A Japanese
speaker will think L’arc en Ciel is just as weird as a French speaker thinks it’s
natural.
So you have to memorize all the morphemes of your language. There’s nothing else for
it. And it’s not just the lexical morphemes, the ones that point to real, concrete things
and actions out in the world, like round or roll or prince. It’s also the little functional
morphemes, the ones that tie everything together.
Functional morphemes tell us about number and tense or whether a noun is meant to serve
as the subject or the object for a sentence, or whether an adjective is meant to be interpreted
with one noun or a different one. We have morphemes for all of that, too, and if we
don’t memorize those, we’ll be stuck, just unable to express what we’re thinking.
Filling up our mental list of morphemes to get everything we need for whatever language
we’re learning is actually a pretty challenging task. After all, speech comes at us in this continuous
stream, words just flowing in on the sound waves which we then have to chop into meaningful
bits. And if that’s not hard enough, often these morphemes come together in bunches,
a big meaningful root with a bunch of little morphemes telling you when or where or even
how something happened.
But it’s not like as proficient, adult speakers of a language, we can’t work this out. Our
brains are nimble, and we don’t generally have any trouble knocking even complex words
apart. Just look at you, listening to this. You didn’t have any trouble getting that
­–ing off listen and knowing that it meant the listen was going on over a period of time.
You didn’t have any problems hearing problems and knowing that that meant there was more
than one problem. We’re pretty good.
So here’s the question, though: are we always good? After all, fishing things out of the
speech stream and working out really quickly what they are is a tough task. Maybe this
is an ability we pick up as we get older. It’s easy to imagine that earlier on, as
little kids, we just hear these words coming at us, and fill up our mental lists with chunks
of meaning. For a single dictionary entry, we could end up with more than one morpheme.
It’s easy to imagine having separate entries for, say, race and raced, or king and kings.
Then, later on, as you got better at picking off those single sounds from the end, and
recognizing them as their own morphemes, you’d just go back through your mental lists, and
prune off the redundant parts.
Now, if you’ve been watching with us all along, you might find this idea unlikely,
since little kids usually have a very solid handle on language. But as we’ll talk about
more in the future, when kids do have problems, it’s often because the cognitive demands
of processing and producing language in real time get to be too much, and so some part
or another gets lost.
The language knowledge is good, but the wiring hasn’t caught up yet, and so part of the
message just falls away into the cosmos. For now, if we assume that heavy processing situations
can cause problems for our little humans, then stripping off morphemes as fast as they
come in is the exact kind of situation we think they might screw up. So what do we do?
How can we know that they’re not just memorizing and then fixing their lists?
Well, fortunately, we have a really simple, powerful test that we can use to scope that
out. It goes something like this: if little kids memorize everything that they hear without
plucking apart the morphemes, what will they do when they hear a word that they’ve never
encountered before? If they haven’t ever seen it, then it can’t be on their lists.
So will they be lost? Or will they be okay?
Linguist Jean Berko Gleason investigated this all the way back in 1958, with a test that’s
become one of the most famous in all of linguistics. The Wug Test invited English-speaking kids from
ages 4 to 7 to answer questions about scenarios involving made-up but plausible
words, like “wug” or “zib”. The most well-known example goes like this:
First, kids see a cute little imaginary creature. “This is a wug,” they’re told. Then,
they see a picture with two cute little imaginary creatures. Then they’re told, “Now there
are two of them. There are two…..” And the kids have to finish the sentence.
Now. What do you think they say? What would you say? If you said “wugs”, then you
and those little kids have something in common. You’ve both internalized how the rules of
English plurals work.
But let’s go back to the idea of memorizing things. What’s really amazing about the
wug test, and what makes it so important, is that kids pretty much all said “wugs”.
None of them had ever heard the word before, because Jean Berko Gleason made it up. So
they couldn’t have memorized it and put it on their big word list. Kids didn’t say
“wug-ss” or “wugi” or “weg” or “wugen”, and they didn’t just shrug
or shake their heads. They said it correctly, because they had more than just a big ol’
list of words in their heads.
What this tells us is that we memorize more than just words. Even as kids, we break down
words into their morphemes, and we learn the rules of how our language works. And this
isn’t limited to plurals, either. The Wug Test has been used in a whole bunch of different languages,
to test a whole bunch of different things. From Taiwanese double reduplication to Hungarian
vowel harmony to Russian yer deletion, the wug test’s been deployed to look at a wide
array of morphological and phonological phenomena. It’s powerful, versatile, and also pretty fun.
So in order for our language to roll along nicely, we need to have good lists of the
sounds and morphemes that we use. But we need to have rules, too, in order to know how to
put those lists together. And it’s not just adults who know how to delicately slice off
morphemes and make the rules work. Kids do too. And we know that thanks to the power of wug.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you were rolling up all
my words and sentences, you learned that we have to memorize the things in language that
are arbitrary, like phonemes and morphemes; that kids build the same kinds of linguistic
lists that adults do; and that we can use the wug test to uncover that information.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistant is Georges Coulombe, our music and
sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments
below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra
material on this topic.
Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own
personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Salang hantle!