Most German Speakers Ignore the Cue That Best Predicts Plural Class

Researchers generally assume that speakers use the linguistic information available to them. For instance, if one grammatical category robustly predicts another grammatical category, we expect speakers to reproduce this conditional relationship during language production. Here, we investigate this assumption for grammatical gender in German. Gender is the single cue which most strongly predicts the plural class of existing German nouns, but behavioral studies with novel nouns have found mixed results regarding the role of gender in plural generalization. Across three experiments, we examine how individual German speakers use grammatical gender when producing plural forms of novel nouns. We find that most speakers effectively ignore gender during plural class production, even under experimental manipulations that encourage them to attend to this cue. These results point toward an underexplored direction in cognitive science: accounting for the linguistic information that speakers do not use.