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German inflection: the exception that proves the rule

G F Marcus1, U Brinkmann, H Clahsen

  • 1Dept. of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 01003, USA.

Cognitive Psychology
|December 1, 1995
PubMed
Summary
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Mental rules are essential for language, acting as a default when memory access fails. This explains how people form regular past tenses and other word forms, even for novel words.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Language acquisition is often viewed as a balance between generative rules and memorized lexicon.
  • Connectionist models propose that pattern association in memory can explain generalization, differing from rule-based accounts only by vocabulary size.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To provide evidence for the indispensability of mental rules in language processing.
  • To investigate the 'default' nature of regular affixation, challenging connectionist explanations.

Main Methods:

  • Examined 21 circumstances of regular past tense formation in English, including novel and unusual words.
  • Conducted two experiments on novel German words to elicit ratings for participle and plural forms.
  • Compared English and German affixation patterns, considering the percentage of regular forms.

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Main Results:

  • People consistently apply regular past tense rules to novel and unusual English words, supporting a default rule mechanism.
  • The default suffixation effect is observed even when regular forms are a minority, as in German, contradicting the connectionist view.
  • Default cases do not rely on similarity in associative memory but on symbol-level operations.

Conclusions:

  • Mental rules are indispensable and operate as a default mechanism independent of memory access.
  • The findings challenge connectionist models by demonstrating that default suffixation is not solely driven by the frequency of regular words.
  • Evidence supports a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation for default affixation.