Arabic linguist1/1/2024 TIPPETT: Do you know where that came from? Was that planted somewhere in your family?ĭR. TIPPETT: As I look at your background, it seems clear that you didn’t know from childhood that you would be a linguist but that you were always fascinated with languages. And though she never learned their mother tongue of Hungarian, she was an avid and gifted polyglot from an early age. “Jean’s Wug Test,” as one admiring linguistics student describes it, “was the first to prove that young children analyze the words around them with innate mental structures and, as if by magic, find complicated rules in this chaotic mess - and actually understand them! This was one of those monumental discoveries that laid the foundation for the modern study of linguistics.” Jean Berko Gleason’s own parents were immigrants from Transylvania. She made her mark on linguistics in 1958 when she published the “Wug Test.” This was, and still is, performed on children, using a simply drawn mythical creature of her devising. TIPPETT: Jean Berko Gleason is Professor Emerita of psychology at Boston University. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Let’s not just assume that we are scientists sitting around watching babies unfold. JEAN BERKO GLEASON: We are innately predisposed to pay attention to little children and to talk to them. Jean Berko Gleason sees this as a frontier every bit as important and thrilling as exploring outer space or the deep sea.ĭR. ![]() This hour, she shares what we keep learning about the human gift, as she puts it, to be conscious of ourselves and to comment on that. And she’s maintained an exuberant and playful spirit to match her youngest research subjects. She is a pioneer in psycholinguistics - in understanding how language emerges from childhood on and what it says about how we think and who we are. In fact, as my guest Jean Berko Gleason was one of the first to confirm, young children know grammatical forms that no one ever tries to teach them and they say things they’ve never heard anyone say before. By the age of three or four, children typically have vocabularies in the thousands of words and a grasp of complex grammar. ![]() KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Beginning to talk, acquiring language, is one of the most ordinary and remarkable things human beings do.
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