German Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Rule

Marcus, Gary; Brinkmann, Ursula; Clahsen, Harald; Wiese, Richard; Pinker, Steven

doi:10.1006/cogp.1995.1015

Cited by 543 publications

(519 citation statements)

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“…Concern about whether eliminative connectionist networks can adequately generalize has been central to most critiques of eliminative connectionism, including Fodor and Pylsyhyn (1988), Hadley (1994), Marcus et al (1995), Prasada and Pinker (1993), and Pinker and Prince (1988). In a suggestion that this article will concur with, Pinker and Prince (p. 176) argued that an important limit on eliminative connectionist models is that they .…”

Section: Previewmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Advocates of symbol-manipulation suppose that there are mentally represented rules that describe relationships between variables, that those variables may be instantiated with particular instances, and that there are operations such as copying and concatenation that perform computations on variables. For instance, the process of forming the regular past tense of an English verb might involve a mechanism that instantiates the variable verb stem with an instance, say fax, and an operation that combines that instance with the -ed morpheme, yielding faxed (e.g., Marcus et al, 1995).…”

Section: Accounting For Universalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…14 The model that Pinker, Prince, and I have proposed for the English past tense is of this sort (Marcus, 1996;Marcus et al, 1995;Pinker, 1991;Pinker & Prince, 1988). Irregular verbs (sing-sang) are inflected by patternassociator while regular verbs are inflected by a rule (concatenate the -ed morpheme to any instantiation of the variable verb stem).…”

Section: Figmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rethinking Eliminative Connectionism

Marcus

1998

Cognitive Psychology

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271

180

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Humans routinely generalize universal relationships to unfamiliar instances. If we are told ''if glork then frum,'' and ''glork,'' we can infer ''frum''; any name that serves as the subject of a sentence can appear as the object of a sentence. These universals are pervasive in language and reasoning. One account of how they are generalized holds that humans possess mechanisms that manipulate symbols and variables; an alternative account holds that symbol-manipulation can be eliminated from scientific theories in favor of descriptions couched in terms of networks of interconnected nodes. Can these ''eliminative'' connectionist models offer a genuine alternative? This article shows that eliminative connectionist models cannot account for how we extend universals to arbitrary items. The argument runs as follows. First, if these models, as currently conceived, were to extend universals to arbitrary instances, they would have to generalize outside the space of training examples. Next, it is shown that the class of eliminative connectionist models that is currently popular cannot learn to extend universals outside the training space. This limitation might be avoided through the use of an architecture that implements symbol manipulation.

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Section: Previewmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Accounting For Universalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Figmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rethinking Eliminative Connectionism

Marcus

1998

Cognitive Psychology

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271

180

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“…It has been claimed that none of the five German plural suffixes is statistically predominant (Köpcke, 1988;MacWhinney & Leinbach, 1991;Marcus, Brinkmann, Clahsen, Wiese, & Pinker, 1995). However, lexico-statistical analyses using the CELEX lexical database for German show that not all of the plurals occur with the same frequency.…”

Section: German Plural Morphologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As can be seen, plurals in -n and -e make up about 70% of all occurring plurals type-wise and about 80% token-wise. Interestingly, the -s suffix, which is claimed to be used as the default plural in German (Clahsen, Rothweiler, Woest, & Marcus, 1992;Marcus et al, 1995), is the one that occurs very infrequently in German.…”

Section: German Plural Morphologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Selection of Grammatical Features in Word Production: The Case of Plural Nouns in German

Schiller

Caramazza

2002

Brain and Language

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Two experiments investigate the effect of number congruency using picture-word interference. Native German participants were required to name pictures of single objects (Nase 'nose') or two instances of the same object (Nasen 'noses') while ignoring simultaneously presented distractor words. Distractor words either had the same number or were different in number. In addition, the type of plural formation (same or different inflectional plural suffix) and the semantic relationship (same or different semantic category) between target and distractor were varied in Experiments 1 and 2. Results showed no effect of number congruency in either experiment. Furthermore, the type of inflectional suffix did not exert an influence on naming latencies in Experiment 1, but semantic relationship led to a significant interference effect in Experiment 2. The results indicate that selection of the number feature diacritic in noun production is not a competitive process. The implications of the results for models of lexical access are discussed.

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Second Language Acquisition and Ultimate Attainment

Birdsong¹

2004

The Handbook of Applied Linguistics

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In second language acquisition (L2A) research, ultimate attainment refers to the outcome or end point of acquisition, and is used interchangeably with the terms final state, end state, and asymptote."Ultimate" is not to be thought of as synonymous with "nativelike," although nativelikeness is one of the observed outcomes of L2A.Most L2A studies have focused on the initial state, stages in L2 development, and rates of acquisition. However, data from such studies do not directly speak to the potential of the learner, which is an inescapable consideration of L2A theory. As we will see, the study of ultimate attainment engages such core L2A issues as native-language influence, access to Universal Grammar, maturational effects, and fossilization.

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German Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Rule

Cited by 543 publications

References 0 publications

Rethinking Eliminative Connectionism

Rethinking Eliminative Connectionism

The Selection of Grammatical Features in Word Production: The Case of Plural Nouns in German

Second Language Acquisition and Ultimate Attainment

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