Written by gabriella

The Hallowe’en Routine

Pumpkin! Pirate! Witch! Ghost! If you grew up celebrating Halloween, you remember dressing up in a costume on October 31st to go trick-or-treating. Each year, costumed young children are instructed to ring a neighbor’s doorbell and say the phrase “Trick or treat.”

What does trick-or-treating teach us about early language acquisition?

Psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason was interested in how young children learn language through routines, such as say “bye-bye,” since routines are among the earliest ways children acquire language. 

She did a study on what she called the Hallowe’en Routine, a limited event occurring annually where the only appropriate thing to say is “trick or treat” when someone opens their front door. Gleason found that when parents instruct children on a routine, such as say Trick or treat or say please, they focus on making sure it is said correctly, and often do not explain why the phrase is being said. Children repeat the routine but may not fully understand why they are saying the words.

Have you ever observed an adult telling an infant to “say” bye-bye while using a hand gesture to wave goodbye? The child may mimic and wave their hand, but they might not be able to say the words bye-bye yet. So, they are getting the routine but maybe not the full social context.

Fun fact: Jean Berko Gleason is most famous for creating the Wug test. She used nonsense names, like wug, to demonstrate that children are very good at pluralizing unfamiliar words. They could determine if the plural should be made by adding an /s/, /z/, or /ɪz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., cat–cats /s/, dog–dogs /z/, witch–witches /ɪz/.

Speaking of plurals, I love collective nouns such as a “parliament of owls” or a “prickle of porcupines.” So here is a matching game of 13 Halloween-themed collective nouns:

  1. An army of _____.
  2. A cackle of _____.
  3. A cauldron of _____.
  4. A generation of _____. 
  5. A glaring of _____.
  6. A knot of _____.
  7. A murder of _____.
  8. A quiver of _____.
  9. A rout of _____.
  10. A shiver of _____.
  11. A slither of _____.
  12. An unkindness _____.
  13. A wake of _____.
  1. Bats
  2. Cats
  3. Cobras
  4. Crows
  5. Frogs
  6. Hyenas
  7. Ravens
  8. Sharks
  9. Snakes
  10. Toads
  11. Vipers
  12. Vultures
  13. Wolves

Answers at the bottom of the references below!

Say bye-bye!

Read more:

Gleason, Jean Berko; Weintraub, Sandra (1976). “The acquisition of routines in child language”. Language in Society. 5 (2): 129–136. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500006977.

Berko, J. (1958). Illustration used for the Wug Test. In The child’s learning of English morphology. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/llustration-used-for-the-wug-test-from-Berko-1958_fig2_267795089.

Watts, R. & Zafarris, J. (Hosts). (2024, April 30). Why is it a “murder” of crows? [Audio podcast episode]. In Words Unravelled. https://audioboom.com/posts/8497580-why-is-it-a-murder-of-crows-collective-nouns.

McLendon, Russell. June 1, 2024. “101 Animal Group Names: A List From A to Z.” Treehugger. https://www.treehugger.com/strange-collective-animal-names-4868835.

Answers: 1E, 2F, 3A, 4K, 5B, 6J, 7D, 8C, 9M, 10H, 11I, 12G, 13L