Jean Berko Gleason
| Jean Berko Gleason | |
|---|---|
October 2011
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| Born | Jean Berko 1931 (age 85–86) Cleveland, Ohio |
| Fields | Psycholinguistics |
| Institutions | Boston University |
| Alma mater | |
| Doctoral advisor | Roger Brown |
| Known for | Research in language acquisition, aphasia, and language attrition; the Wug Test |
| Spouse | Andrew M. Gleason (m. 1959) |
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Website jeanberkogleason |
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 Jean Berko Gleason, Hi, Thanks, and Goodbye. NOVA's Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers |
Jean Berko Gleason (born 1931) is a professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (formerly the Department of Psychology) at Boston University, a psycholinguist who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions.
Of her Wug Test, by which she demonstrated that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology, it has been said, "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."
Jean Berko was born to Hungarian immigrant parents in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Cleveland Heights High School in 1949, Gleason earned a B.A. in history and literature from Radcliffe College, then an M.A. in linguistics, and a combined Ph.D. in linguistics and psychology, at Harvard; from 1958 to 1959 she was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. In graduate school she was advised by Roger Brown, a founder in the field of child language acquisition. In January 1959 she married Harvard mathematician Andrew Gleason; they had three daughters.
Most of Gleason's professional career has been at Boston University, where she served as Psychology Department chair and director of the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics; Lise Menn and Harold Goodglass were among her collaborators there.
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