this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
94 points (86.2% liked)

General Discussion

12139 readers
116 users here now

Welcome to Lemmy.World General!

This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.


🪆 About Lemmy World


🧭 Finding CommunitiesFeel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!

Also keep an eye on:

For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!


💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:


Rules

Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.0. See: Rules for Users.

  1. No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
  2. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
  4. Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
  5. Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
  6. No Ads/Spamming.
  7. No NSFW content.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
94
Hey. You. Fill in the blank. (upload.wikimedia.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From Wikipedia for the people like me that are curious

A Nice link to the Wiki Page

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 /ɪz/ 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago