慕う [したう] - to yearn for, to long for, to pine for, to miss, to love dearly, to adore; to follow (someone); to idolize (for virtue, learning, status, etc.) 日和る [ひよる] - to wait and see, to sit on the fence, to be noncommittal 出勤 [しゅっきん] - going to work, leaving for work, attendance (at work), being at work, presence (in the office), reporting for work 束縛 [そくばく] - restraint, restriction, fetters, yoke, shackles 独占欲 [どくせんよく] - possessiveness, desire to monopolize, desire for control 耕す [たがやす] - to till, to plow, to plough, to cultivate 土足 [どそく] - shod feet, wearing shoes 加害者 [かがいしゃ] - perpetrator; wrong-doer; aggressor; assailant; offender 拡大 [かくだい] - expansion, extension; magnification, enlargement, escalation, spread 拡大鏡 [かくだいきょう] - magnifying glass, magnifier, loupe 押しかける [おしかける] - to go uninvited, to call on without an invitation, to barge in on, to gatecrash 自覚 [じかく] - self-consciousness, self-awareness 小柄 [こがら] - small build, small stature, petite 出費 [すっぴ] - expenses, disbursements 土葬 [どそう] - burial, interment 火葬 [かそう] - cremation 火葬場 [かそうば] - crematory, crematorium
Our school is the second of 217 supplementary schools in the world to be established and has a long history, and promotes integrated education with young children, elementary school, middle school, and high school students.
If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?
The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:
“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules—for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:
This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.
Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.
The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive-er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:
This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.
This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.
(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)
Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings—to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms—to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words—implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.
The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”
Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:
My journey learning Japanese as a second language. Expect bad puns, and information about language and culture.
Main blog: positivemotivation.tumblr.com
