Summary of The Childs Learning of English Morphology

Berko’s research Idea was a clever one; If it is the case that children derive
morphological rules from the language they hear daily, then they will also apply those
rules to words they have never heard before. Researching and testing this idea, is
how the so called 'wug test' came about.

Berko decided to show children, aged four to seven, pictures of imaginary things like
animals, fantasy plants and non-existant things in general, while uttering invented
nouns and verbs. Following, the children were required to provide the intended word
with a plural ending, possessive ending, third person ending, or endings in past
tense, drawing their information from the cards; ‘This is a wug. Now there’s another
one. There are two of them. Now there are two ……’ Children who mastered the
morphological rules of the English language would respond with ‘wugs’ , adding the
/z/ sound at the end.

However, it is likely that the acquisition of plurals, past tense forms, and other
requests alike, might essentially involve learning associations. If that is the case,
Berko says:
“The child might be expected to refuse to answer our questions on the grounds that
he had never before heard of a wug, for instance, and could not possibly give us the
plural form since no one had ever told him what it was.” (p. 170-171).

Children did encounter some difficulty with invented words ending in a hissing sound
('niz,' 'gutch,' etc.), which required the /-əz/ ending. Berko's interpretation is that
children have a single rule: "a final sibilant makes a word plural" (p. 173). This rule
generates both /-s/ and /-z/ plurals but also implies that if a word ends in a hissing
sound, a change in form in the plural is unnecessary. This is often what children did
with these words - they simply repeated them literally.
The results from other inflectional tests (possessive, third person singular, past
tense) mirrored those of plural formation.