Processing and Representation of German -n Plurals: A Dual Mechanism Approach

Sonnenstuhl, Ingrid; Huth, Axel

doi:10.1006/brln.2001.2524

Cited by 38 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…For the frequency matching, the word-form frequency of the singular forms of the nouns that take irregular plurals was matched with the lemma frequency of the nouns that take regular plurals. This was done because the recognition of irregular plural forms appears to be mainly affected by word-form frequency, whilst the recognition of regular plurals is by lemma/stem frequency (see e.g., Sonnenstuhl & Huth, 2002). Overall, the items were tightly controlled for these three matched variables.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The time-course of morphological constraints

Cunnings

Clahsen

2008

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The avoidance of regular but not irregular plurals inside compounds (e.g., *rats eater vs. mice eater) has been one of the most widely studied morphological phenomena in the psycholinguistics literature. To examine whether the constraints that are responsible for this contrast have any general significance beyond compounding, we investigated derived word forms containing regular and irregular plurals in two experiments. Experiment 1 was an offline acceptability judgment task, and Experiment 2 measured eye movements during reading derived words containing regular and irregular plurals and uninflected base nouns. The results from both experiments show that the constraint against regular plurals inside compounds generalizes to derived words. We argue that this constraint cannot be reduced to phonological properties, but is instead morphological in nature. The eye-movement data provide detailed information on the time-course of processing derived word forms indicating that early stages of processing are affected by a general constraint that disallows inflected words from feeding derivational processes, and that the more specific constraint against regular plurals comes in at a subsequent later stage of processing. We argue that these results are consistent with stage-based models of language processing.Morphological systems are constrained in how inflectional, derivational, and compounding processes may interact with each other. There is, for example, a general tendency for inflectional suffixes to attach outside derivational ones, which is captured by Greenberg's (1966, p. 93) Universal 28: 'If both the derivation and inflection follow the root, or they both precede the root, the derivation is always between the root and the inflection' . Thus in English, forms such as ducklings with the plural suffix appearing after the derivational suffix are grammatically well-formed but not forms with the reverse order (*ducksling).Linguists have analyzed the interaction between different morphological processes in terms of affix-specific selectional restrictions (see e.g., Fabb, 1988;Plag, 1996Plag, , 1999Plag, , 2002 and other kinds of more general constraints (of a semantic,

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The time-course of morphological constraints

Cunnings

Clahsen

2008

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“…For example, while the -s plural is generally considered the regular form, it only appears in 4% of types (2% of tokens; Sonnenstuhl & Huth, 2002). The most frequent plural inflection is -n/ -en (48% types; 45% tokens;) The simple -n ending can be considered predictable in the context of 'feminine' nouns that end in schwa.…”

Section: Beyond Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lexical-syntactic representation of number

Nickels

Biedermann

Fieder

et al. 2014

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Number is an important aspect of lexical syntax. While there has been substantial research devoted to number agreement at the level of the sentence, relatively less attention has been paid to the representation of number at the level of individual lexical items. In this paper, we propose a representational framework for the lexical syntax of number in spoken word production that we believe can account for much of the data regarding number in noun and noun phrase production. This framework considers the representation of regular and irregular nouns, and more unusual cases such as pluralia tantum (e.g. scissors), zero plurals (e.g. sheep) and mass nouns (e.g. garlic). We not only address bare noun production but also the production of determiner + noun phrases. While focusing on examples from English, we extend the framework to include languages with grammatical gender such as German.

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“…which have been encountered are stored in long-term lexical memory, irrespective of whether they are simple or complex, and irrespective of whether they are regular or irregular. The hypothesis of storage of full forms ( [23], see also [21,24]) recently has received extensive experimental support [25,26,27,28,29]. These experimental results are in harmony with the more general view in memory research that any experience leaves a memory trace, and that, as phrased by Landauer ([30], p. 493), we should not be looking for models and mechanisms that produce storage economies, but rather models 'in which marvels are produced by profligate use of capacity'.…”

Section: Graded Structure In Morphologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting paradigms: gradient structure in morphology

Hay

Baayen

2005

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

235

128

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Teaser: Is probability part of the grammar? Evidence is accumulating that word structure is inherently graded.Keywords: morphology, probability, gradience, word structure, morpheme, affix, paradigmatics, analogy, productivity, relative frequency, juncture, level ordering 1 Abstract:Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. A vigorous ongoing debate addresses the question of how such internal structure is best accounted for, by means of lexical entries and deterministic symbolic rules, or by means of probabilistic subsymbolic networks implicitly encoding structural similarities in connection weights. In this review, we separate the question of subsymbolic versus symbolic implementation from the question of deterministic versus probabilistic structure. We outline a growing body of evidence, mostly external to the above debate, indicating that morphological structure is indeed intrinsically graded. By allowing probability into the grammar, progress can be made toward solving some long-standing puzzles in morphological theory. 2Shifting paradigms: gradient structure in morphology

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Processing and Representation of German -n Plurals: A Dual Mechanism Approach

Cited by 38 publications

References 26 publications

The time-course of morphological constraints

The time-course of morphological constraints

The lexical-syntactic representation of number

Shifting paradigms: gradient structure in morphology

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