Join Dr. Jean Berko Gleason, mother of psycholinguistics, for a post-show discussion to learn more about language acquisition and the nuances of Brodie’s work as a linguist.

Dr. Jean Berko Gleason is one of the world’s leading experts on children’s language and one of the founding mothers of the field of psycholinguistics. She created the Wug Test, the best known experimental study of children’s language acquisition. By asking children to make plurals and past tenses of words they have never seen before she demonstrated that even very young children have systematic knowledge of their language. She is the author and editor of leading textbooks on language development and psycholinguistics and has published more than 125 articles on aphasia, language attrition, language development in children, gender differences in parents’ speech, and parent-child interaction in the Hungarian Gypsy/Roma population.

She currently is professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. Dr. Gleason has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Harvard, and the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard/Radcliffe, and an honorary doctorate from Washington & Jefferson College in 2016. She is a member of the Academy of Aphasia, has been president of the International Association for the Study of Child Language and of the Gypsy Lore Society. Her work is often cited in the professional literature, and has been featured in the popular press and on television. She is featured in the PBS award-winning online Nova Science Now series “The Secret Life of Scientists.”