G. Durieux

Dutch Plural Inflection: The Exception that Proves the Analogy.

We develop the view that inflection is driven partly by non-phonological analogy and that non-phonological information is of particular importance to the inflection of non-canonical roots, which in the view of [Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: the exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 189-256.] are inflected by a symbolic rule process. We used the Dutch plural to evaluate these claims. An analysis of corpus data shows that a model using non-phonological information (orthography) produces significantly fewer errors on plurals of non-canonical Dutch nouns, in particular borrowings, than a model that includes only phonological information. Moreover, we show that a double default system, as proposed by Pinker [Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules. London: Phoenix.], does not offer an advantage over the latter model. A second study, examining the use of orthography in an online plural production task, shows that, in Dutch, the chosen pseudoword plural is significantly affected by non-phonological information. A final simulation study confirms that these results are in line with a model of inflectional morphology that explains the inflection of non-canonical roots by non-phonological analogy instead of by a default rule process.

Notes on Ingram's whole-word measures for phonological development.

In this note we discuss pMLU, a whole-word measure for phonological development that was proposed by Ingram (2002). Ingrams rules for calculating pMLU are analysed and we point at the crucial role of the level of transcription for making pMLU measurements comparable over different corpora. The main aim of the paper is an assessment of the reliability and the validity of pMLU. The assessment is accomplished using a computational tool for measuring pMLU on two large Dutch CHILDES corpora. We propose minimal sample sizes for reliable measurements relative to the stage of phonological development.