MIT Center for Cognitive Science Occasional Paper #47

[Gary Marcus]

Would you please post the following announcement? Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Gary Marcus
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The following technical report is now available:

		   MIT CENTER FOR COGNITIVE SCIENCE
			 OCCASIONAL PAPER #47

			

	German Inflection: The Exception that Proves the Rule

			    Gary F. Marcus
				 MIT

			   Ursula Brinkmann
	      Max-Planck-Institut fuer Psycholinguistik
				   
			    Harald Clahsen
			    Richard Wiese
			    Andreas Woest
		 Universit at act[c]t D at act[y]sseldorf.
				   
			    Steven Pinker
				 MIT
				   
			       ABSTRACT



Language is often explained by generative rules and a memorized lexicon. For
example, most English verbs take a regular past tense suffix
(ask-asked), which is applied to new verbs (faxed, wugged),
suggesting the mental rule "add -d to a Verb."  Irregular verbs
(break-broke, go-went) would be listed in memory.  Connectionists
argue instead that a pattern associator memory can store and
generalize all past tense forms; irregular and regular patterns differ
only because of their different numbers of verbs. We present evidence
that mental rules are indispensible. A rule concatenates a suffix to a
symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs
or their sounds, but applies as the "default," whenever memory access
fails.  We find 20 such circumstances, including novel,
unusual-sounding, and derived words; in every case, people inflect
them regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, sabre-tooths,
walkmans). Contrary to connectionist accounts, these effects are not
due to regular words being in the majority. The German participle
-t and plural -s apply to minorities of words. Two experiments
eliciting ratings of novel German words show that the affixes behave like
their English counterparts, as defaults.  Thus default suffixation is
not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative
memory, but to a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental
operation. 

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