Jean Berko Gleason: Hi, Thanks, and Goodbye

(upbeat music) - When I was a little girl I was always fascinated by language.

So I tended to drive my family crazy by going up to them and saying things like, I'll get (indistinct), what does that mean?

They'd say doesn't mean anything.

And I would become very angry and say, well, it must mean something in some language.

But when I got to college that's when I really got into language, I went and took Arabic, Latin, German, French, Sanskrit, Norwegian.

While I was taking all those languages, I took a course on the psychology of language, and that's psycholinguistics and I realized that, that was really what I wanted to know.

How did you get the language that's out there into your head?

In our society, we teach children to say hi, thanks and goodbye, and in fact we've written some papers called hi, thanks and goodbye.

And it's really important.

One example of how important it is, is something that happened to me when my own children were small.

I had to drive the carpool, and there was one boy, this kid got out of the car and he shut the door and he never said thank you and he never said goodbye.

He just got out and shut the door and walked away.

And I still hate him.

I said, what a rotten kid?

Didn't that boy feel thankfulness in his heart?

I don't care.

I wanted him to say thanks just to acknowledge the fact that I slept him all the way home.

So I tell anybody if you teach your children anything, teach them to say, hi, thanks and goodbye appropriately.

Makes people like your children.

And if they don't do it, people will hate your children.

It's really important to study psycholinguistic for a number of reasons.

We're talking about pure science, that's as important as outer space or the deep sea.

We're learning how human beings think.

So that's what's been driving me for the past, don't ask, 50 or 60 years.

(upbeat music)