The Wug technique revisited

Berko's Wug technique, which refers to the use of nonce (invented) words to test linguistic knowledge, has been used with a wide range of age groups. Imperfect results with the test stimuli were typically obtained from children who fully controlled the construction in question in their spontaneous speech. In the present study, a group of 7-year-old and a group of 2-year-old Hebrew speakers were tested for their knowledge of pluralization of real and nonce nouns. It was found that the two groups differ significantly: Whereas the 2-year-olds pluralize nonce words in the same ways that they do real nouns, the 7-year-olds' handling of the nonce forms radically depart from their own ways of handling real nouns. It is suggested that the internal organization of the linguistic knowledge of fluent speakers differs from that of speakers who are in the process of learning a given system. The nonce-word test may be more adequate for assessing the knowledge of a system still in the process of being learned than for that of a well-established linguistic procedure.