Paradigmatic Relations Interact During the Production of Complex Words: Evidence From Variable Plurals in Dutch

A growing body of work in psycholinguistics suggests that morphological relations between word forms affect the processing of complex words. Previous studies have usually focused on a particular type of paradigmatic relation, for example the relation between paradigm members, or the relation between alternative forms filling a particular paradigm cell. However, potential interactions between different types of paradigmatic relations have remained relatively unexplored. This paper presents two corpus studies of variable plurals in Dutch to test hypotheses about potentially interacting paradigmatic effects. The first study shows that generalization across noun paradigms predicts the distribution of plural variants, and that this effect is diminished for paradigms in which the plural variants are more likely to have a strong representation in the mental lexicon. The second study demonstrates that the pronunciation of a target plural variant is affected by coactivation of the alternative variant, resulting in shorter segmental durations. This effect is dependent on the representational strength of the alternative plural variant. In sum, by exploring interactions between different types of paradigmatic relations, this paper provides evidence that storage of morphologically complex words may affect the role of generalization and coactivation during production.