Article published In:
The Mental LexiconVol. 18:3 (2023) ► pp.417–445
German nominal number interpretation in an impaired mental lexicon
A naive discriminative learning perspective
There is an ongoing debate on how speakers and listeners process and interpret information in a morphological
system that is very complex and not very transparent. A well-known test case is the German nominal number system. In this paper we
employ discriminative learning (e.g., Ramscar & Yarlett, 2007; Baayen et al., 2011, 2019) to test whether
discriminative learning networks can be used to better understand the processing of German number. We analyse behavioral data
obtained from a patient with primary progressive aphasia (Domahs et al., 2017), and the
unimpaired system. We test a model that implements the traditional cues borrowed from the schema approach (Köpcke, 1988, 1993; Köpcke
et al., 2021), and compare it to a model that uses segmental and phonotactic information only. Our results for the
unimpaired system demonstrate that a model based on only biphones as cues is better able to predict the number of a given
word-form than a model using structural phonological cues. We also test whether a discriminative learning model can predict the
number decisions by the aphasic patient. The results demonstrate that a biphone-based discriminative model trained on the
patient’s responses is superior to a structure-based model in approximating the patient’s behavior.
Keywords: number inflection, discriminative learning, morpho-phonology, aphasia, German
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Approaches to German nominal number
- 2.1Schemas
- 2.2Computational approaches
- 2.3Modeling nominal number with discriminative learning
- 3.Methods
- 3.1The patient
- 3.2Data set
- 3.3Setting up the NDL models
- 4.Results
- 4.1NDL: Overall performance
- 4.1.1The language
- 4.1.2The patient
- 4.2NDL: The strength of the structural cues
- 4.1NDL: Overall performance
- 5.Discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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