Jean Berko Gleason

Jean Berko Gleason
Gleason in 2011
Born	Jean Berko 1931 (age 92–93) Cleveland, Ohio
Known for	Research in language acquisition, aphasia, and language attrition Wug Test
Spouse	Andrew M. Gleason ​ (m. 1959)​
Academic background
Alma mater	Radcliffe College (A.B., A.M.) Harvard University (Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisor	Roger Brown
Academic work
Discipline	Linguist
Sub-discipline	Psycholinguistics
Institutions	Boston University
Website	jeanberkogleason.com

Jean Berko Gleason (born 1931) is an American psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University^[1] who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions.^[2]

Gleason created the Wug Test, in which a child is shown pictures with nonsense names and then prompted to complete statements about them, and used it to demonstrate that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology. Menn and Ratner have written that "Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research", the "wug" (one of the imaginary creatures Gleason drew in creating the Wug Test) being "so basic to what [psycholinguists] know and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins."^[2]