Most German Speakers Ignore the Cue That Best Predicts Plural Class

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics

Background:

• Speakers generally utilize available linguistic information for language production.
• Grammatical gender in German strongly predicts noun plural class.
• Previous studies on novel nouns yielded mixed results on gender's role in plural generalization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether German speakers use grammatical gender when producing plural forms of novel nouns.
• To examine the influence of experimental manipulations on gender use in pluralization.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted with individual German speakers.
• Participants produced plural forms for novel German nouns.

Main Results:

• The majority of speakers ignored grammatical gender during plural class production.
• This pattern persisted even when participants were encouraged to attend to gender cues.

Conclusions:

• Grammatical gender is not consistently used by German speakers for plural generalization with novel nouns.
• Cognitive science needs to explore the linguistic information speakers do not utilize during language production.