fill in the missing word

[Jean Berko Gleason]

Hi   I agree that filling in the missing word, especially in the middle
of a sentence, can be confusing. In the original wug test we tried to
put the required word at the end of the sentence, and in all of the past
tense questions we did indeed also ask a question about what happened,
as Brian suggests...Here is the original wording:

"This is a man who knows how to spow.  He is spowing.  He did the same
thing yesterday.  What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he....."
(similar for rick, mot, gling, bing, bod, and ring)

By asking what he did first, and then beginning the sentence that had to
be finished with the appropriately inflected verb we pretty well
constrained the kids to produce the verb+ending, if they could do this.
If you just say, "What did he do yesterday" you are more likely to get
the zero marked answer "spow".  But if you then add, "Yesterday
he...???" there aren't a lot of choices.    We used the same format for
the progressive:  "This is a man who knows how to zib.  What is he
doing?  He is ....?"   With the progressives, fully 97% of first graders
said "zibbing";  about 75-80% got the -t or -d past tenses, and where
the stem was "bod" only 31% of first graders (and 14% of preschoolers)
came up with the -ed.

Preschoolers seem to be quite comfortable with this format, and not at
all confused about what is called for.  Many of them have no doubt
already had experience with parents' test questions that are presented
in much the same way. In one of our tapes we have a dad, for instance,
who holds up a dime and asks his son, "Who's picture is on the dime?
It's Franklin D. ......?"  The kid responds, "Jefferson."

--
Jean