Our Twitterscript of Jean Berko Gleason Interview

by Susan Leem, associate producer

this is a wugWug graffitti on the street. (photo: Adam Albright/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This week we interviewed Jean Berko Gleason, a psycholinguist who is now a professor emerita at Boston University, about how we learn and use the most valuable of skills: human language. She’s best known for her wug test experiment, revealing that children develop general systems to learn language.

We live-tweeted highlights of this 90-minute conversation and have aggregated them below for those who weren’t able to follow along. Follow us next time at @BeingTweets and this Thursday, October 6th, look for the produced show via our podcast our on your local public radio station:

  1. For the next 90 minutes we’ll be live-tweeting Krista’s interview with psycholinguistics superstar Jean Berko Gleason. Join us! 1:27 PM Sep 27th
  2. Dr. Gleason’s famous “Wug” test forever changed our understanding of how humans learn language. 1:28 PM Sep 27th
  3. Professor Gleason settling in at the mic, asking Krista if it’s ok that she “doesn’t do religion.” 1:37 PM Sep 27th
  4. Dr. Gleason says her early experience translating her older brother’s speech (he had cerebral palsy) sparked her love for linguistics. 1:44 PM Sep 27th
  5. “Charles Darwin wrote notebooks of one of his sons and outlined how he acquired language.” -Dr. Berko Gleason1:45 PM Sep 27th
  6. “Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution.”-Jean Berko Gleason1:50 PM Sep 27th
  7. “It isn’t that kids learn language in bits and pieces, the children abstract the rules of the language in the same order.” -Dr. Berko Gleason 1:55 PM Sep 27th
  8. “There’s a broad spectrum of belief of how kids come to, say, two wugs.” -Jean Berko Gleason 1:56 PM Sep 27th
  9. “Your brain is not formed when you’re born, you have to build your brain.” -Jean Berko Gleason 1:58 PM Sep 27th
  10. “Language develops by interacting with other people talking to you.” -Jean Berko Gleason. 1:59 PM Sep 27th
  11. “Language development is a cooperative event, it happens between children and the people around them.” -J. Berko Gleason 2:01 PM Sep 27th
  12. RT @GreggGraham: @Beingtweets But storytelling appears to be a human universal from the beginning. 2:02 PM Sep 27th
  13. “(to learn language) You need not just the cognitive stuff, but emotional underpinnings, you have to care about other people.” -J.B. Gleason 2:02 PM Sep 27th
  14. “In the beginning language is there so we can say ‘mommy I want you.’” -Jean Berko Gleason 2:03 PM Sep 27th
  15. “Kids will use their own system at the stage that they are, they’re not (learning merely by) imitating you.” -Jean Berko Gleason. 2:08 PM Sep 27th
  16. “A whole lot of creatures have complex and meaningful lives.” J. Berko Gleason on sentience. 2:12 PM Sep 27th
  17. “We have this enormous connection to the living world that is reflected in our language.” -Jean Berko Gleason 2:14 PM Sep 27th
  18. “Of the top 30 words that parents are calling kids’ attention to (‘look at the…’), 12 are animals.” -Jean Berko Gleason. 2:18 PM Sep 27th
  19. “Undergrads should not just take business classes, but business classes plus Sansrkit. It has an affect on your for all your life.” -Gleason 2:25 PM Sep 27th
  20. @WDET? @FightersDay: shoot I took Chinese Saturday School as a kid. How do I learn Sanskrit - where is a good school near Detroit (my city)? 2:28 PM Sep 27th
  21. “Different languages cut the world into different slices.” -Jean Berko Gleason 2:52 PM Sep 27th
  22. “They are not talking, it is called jargon babbling” - Gleason on the viral twins video - http://bit.ly/gaojdQ 2:52 PM Sep 27th
  23. “It’s not just children who carry innate things. We come with a long history of being attached to other living creatures.” -Gleason 2:53 PM Sep 27th
  24. “We’re innately predisposed to pay attention to little children. We’re not just watching babies unfold. We’re unfolding with them.” -Gleason 2:55 PM Sep 27th
  25. “Human beings are able to reflect on their existence…for now that distinguishes us from other creatures.” -Jean Berko Gleason 2:57 PM Sep 27th
  26. “I think people should be brave and take a chance and do what excites them.” -Jean Berko Gleason’s advice to young people 2:59 PM Sep 27th

22 Notes/ Hide

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