Berent and Pinker (2007) presented five experiments concerning the formation of compounds, especially the apparent restriction on the occurrence of “regular” plurals as modifiers (as in *RATS-EATER). Their data were said to support a “words and rules” approach to inflectional morphology, and to contradict the approach developed by Haskell, MacDonald, and Seidenberg (2003) in which multiple probabilistic constraints, mainly involving semantic and phonological properties of words, determine degree of acceptability. We examine Berent and Pinker’s studies and show that a) their experiments tested hypotheses that are incorrectly ascribed to our theory, and b) their data are actually compatible with our account. Contrary to the words and rules approach, there are phonological effects on modifier acceptability that cannot be subsumed by a grammatical rule.
Jaensch, Carol, Vera Heyer, Peter Gordon & Harald Clahsen
2014. What Plurals and Compounds Reveal about Constraints in Word Formation. Language Acquisition 21:4 ► pp. 319 ff.
Seidenberg, Mark S. & David C. Plaut
2014. Quasiregularity and Its Discontents: The Legacy of the Past Tense Debate. Cognitive Science 38:6 ► pp. 1190 ff.
Clahsen, Harald, Loay Balkhair, John-Sebastian Schutter & Ian Cunnings
2013. The time course of morphological processing in a second language. Second Language Research 29:1 ► pp. 7 ff.
Hanssen, Esther, Arina Banga, Robert Schreuder & Anneke Neijt
2013. Semantic and prosodic effects of Dutch linking elements. Morphology 23:1 ► pp. 7 ff.
Silva, Renita, Sabrina Gerth & Harald Clahsen
2013. Morphological constraints in children’s spoken language comprehension: A visual world study of plurals inside compounds in English. Cognition 129:2 ► pp. 457 ff.
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