If we want to see if kids learn new words from hearing a book, there are different ways we could do this. We would, of course, read them a story and then measure how many words from the story they know. But is it really that simple? How would we know that the kids did not already know those words before they heard the stories? We have a really fun solution: we write our own storybooks so we can put special words in them! These special words are called "target words." The special words we use are made-up words like "sprock" and "manu." They sound like real words but we make them up. That way, we can know that kids do not already know the words before we even read the stories. Lots of studies use made-up words like these for the same reason. One famous study is "the Wug Test" . Kids have not heard the word wug before, but if you tell them "Here is a wug, here is another wug, now there are two ___" they know the next word is "wugs."

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00030