This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 16: Learning parts of words - Morphemes and the wug test. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 16 shownotes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne, and today we’re looking at the smallest meaningful parts of language and how we learn them! But first: we had a great time at Winter/Summer Conference Fest 2017/18.

Gretchen: That’s a lot of slashes. We had so much fun seeing people in their Lingthusiasm International Phonetic Alphabet scarves and their other Lingthusiasm merch, and please keep sending in your pictures, we’re gonna make a collage of everybody with Lingthusiasm stuff! And it was so fun to see you all in meat space. I was only at the LSA in Utah, Lauren was at both the LSA in Utah and the ALS, the Australian Linguistic Society, in – where was it, Lauren?

Lauren: So, Gretchen and I got to hang out at the Linguistic Society of America annual conference in Salt Lake City in Utah along with a few thousand other linguists, and it was amazing! It was my first time I’ve ever been to an LSA, but before that in December I was at the Australian Linguistic Society conference – hence the Winter/Summer 2017/2018 Conference Fest – and it was so great to see everyone and to see so many people wearing IPA scarves, it just made me so happy. While I was at ALS I had the chance to chat with Daniel Midgley from Talk the Talk about the workshop we did on popularising linguistics, and that is going to be part of our Patreon bonus episode this month.

Gretchen: I am really excited to listen to that recording because I haven’t heard it yet!

Lauren: Great Patreon news 2018: we have full-length episodes for every bonus episode, so you are getting more bonus bang for your Patreon buck with those.

Gretchen: Yeah! So, full episodes there. And you guys have been so amazing at supporting us on Patreon that we have to set some new goals. What a hardship. Just kidding, we’re very excited. So we have set a new goal to commission some Lingthusiasm art! We’re really excited that we get to support an artist and have some cool art of the show!

Lauren: I am really excited for this goal. That is a new $1,200 goal, we still have the live show to aspire to as well, and we are already plotting all kinds of other exciting future Patreon shenanigans.

Gretchen: We bumped the live show up to $1,600 just because we want to have a bit more time to plan that and make it go really well, and we had a mini live show in September already, so we want to space out the live shows a bit, get the art in sooner because people have been so keen about the merch, we want to have more art-type options for that, and yeah, we’re really excited!

[Music]

Gretchen: So one big question in linguistics is how do babies learn words? And how do they learn the pieces of words and the way that we put words together to make them into longer sentences and compound words? And we talked a bit about how babies learn sounds back in a previous episode, but the word part, it has been a long-standing puzzle. And one of the options that people talked about, early in the days of figuring out how how babies learn words, is maybe they memorise them! Maybe they hear the adults say the words and they say, “Aha! This must be a word that I’m trying to learn!” And so they just memorise them, kind of like whatever the adults come out with, the baby just learns.

Lauren: They are just a word vacuum!

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 16:  Learning parts of words -  Morphemes and the wug test

Here’s a strange little blue animal you’ve never seen before. It’s called a wug. Now here’s another one. There are two of them. There are two ___? 

You probably thought “wugs” – and even kids as young as 3 years old would agree with you. But how did you know this, if you’ve never heard the word “wug” before? What is it that you know, exactly, when you know how to add that -s?  

Now try saying two cat__ 🐈🐈, two dog__ 🐕🐕 and two horse__ 🐎🐎. Why did you end up with catssss but dogzzzz, and have to add a whole extra syllable to horse? 

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into the realm of language between words and sounds, the realm of morphemes like “wug” and “cat” and “-s” and “pre-” and “episode”.  What do you know subconsciously about how morphemes fit together? How do kids learn them from such an early age? How do linguists test what kids know about words? 

Wugs, in fact, are no longer often used for the wug test, because their cute, birdlike shape has become so famous as an unofficial mascot of linguistics that we can’t assume people haven’t seen the word anymore! People have made wug cookies, crochet wugs, wug memes, and more fun wug items, and you can check out some of our favourite wuggish links below. 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

This month’s Patreon bonus episode is an interview with Daniel Midgley of Talk the Talk about communicating linguistics, and how we are all linguistic geniuses. We also have a new Patreon goal: at $1,200 we’re going to commission a linguist-artist to illustrate a memorable bit from the show! Everyone will get to see the art, which we’ll also make available on merch, and patrons will also get a high-resolution download and behind-the-scenes concept sketches. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Take the full wug test (or try it with a child in your life!) 
  
• The original wug test paper (Berko Gleason 1958)
• wugs, blicks, and kazhes
  
• IOLing 2003 Adyghe morphology problem
  
• “I cooked the wrong meat for them again“ in Mayali
• -spiration
• Teaching yourself morphology
• Morphology meme
• Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax
  
• Longest word in Turkish

Here is a list of cool wug stuff mentioned in this episode:

• Wug cookies (1) (2) (3)
  
• Jumping wug
• The wugs are breeding
• More wugs
• Noots
• Arrival wugs
  
• Renaming ponytails hairwugs
  
• Wugs on mugs
• A knitted wug
• One wug, two wug, red wug, blue wug
  
• Wuge
• wugalicious mock battle
  
• A wug poem
  
• Jean Berko Gleason, creator of the wug test, with a very large wug

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Emily Gref, our production assistant is Celine Yoon, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).