Editing Nonce word (section)

==In child development studies==

Nonce words are sometimes used to study the [[Language development|development of language]] in children, because they allow researchers to test how children treat words of which they have no prior knowledge. This permits inferences about the default assumptions children make about new word meanings, syntactic structure, etc. "Wug" is among the earliest known nonce words used in language learning studies, and is best known for its use in [[Jean Berko Gleason|Jean Berko]]'s "Wug test", in which children were presented with a novel object, called a wug, and then shown multiple instances of the object and asked to complete a sentence that elicits a plural form—e.g., "This is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two...?" The use of the plural form "wugs" by the children suggests that they have applied a plural rule to the form, and that this knowledge is not specific to prior experience with the word but applies to most English nouns, whether familiar or novel.<ref>{{cite book |title=Methods for Studying Language Production |isbn=978-0-8058-3033-0 |publisher=Lawrence Erlbaum associates |year=2000 |editor1=Lise Menn |editor2=Nan Bernstein Ratner |editor1-link=Lise Menn |editor2-link=Nan Bernstein Ratner |chapter=In the Beginning Was the Wug |author1=Lise Menn |author2=Nan Bernstein Ratner |pages=1–26}}</ref>

Nancy N. Soja, [[Susan Carey]], and [[Elizabeth Spelke]] used "blicket", "stad", "mell", "coodle", "doff", "tannin", "fitch", and "tulver" as nonce words when testing to see if children's knowledge of the distinction between non-solid substances and solid objects preceded or followed their knowledge of the distinction between [[mass noun]]s and [[count noun]]s.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Soja |first1=Nancy N. |last2=Carey |first2=Susan |last3=Spelke |first3=Elizabeth S. |date=1991-02-01 |title=Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meaning: Object terms and substance terms |url=https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277%2891%2990051-5 |journal=Cognition |volume=38 |issue=2 |pages=179–211 |doi=10.1016/0010-0277(91)90051-5 |url-access=subscription }}</ref>