WUG test

Jean Berko's Zib Test

What do you think she was trying to show with her experiment? Why did she choose imaginary words?

I think that she was trying to show the difference between an adult and child's response to a new word. Throughout the test it showed that an adult knew how to change a word when there was more then one or what a baby one was. For example the adult learnt the new word 'wug' and instinctively knew from experience that a baby 'wug' was called a 'wugette' which then shows that this adult was likely to have gone threw all of the grammatical development stages successfully, which for a child how has not yet progressed through all of the grammatical development they will not be able to understand what a 'wugette', or a 'wuggy' is. Similarly a new word was introduced which was 'zib'. Jean Berko the experimenter said 'this man is zibbing, so what is he called?' the adult participant rightly said 'zibber' like a man is baking therefore he is a baker. Jean Berko then expressed that a child would be more likely to call the 'zibber' a 'zib man'. This is showing that for those children who have not progress threw all the stages of development yet then they arent likely to be able to define what a 'wugette' or a 'zibber' is.