The Case of the German Plural: Can Too Many Rules Mean No Rule-governed System at All?

Previous research on the acquisition of morphological markers has focused on whether they are learned via rule induction (Marcus et al., 1992) or through an instancebased manner (Marchman, Plunkett & Goodman, 1997). To provide evidence on this debate, this paper focuses on the German plural as it is a case where there are many morphological markers used to mark the same inflectional class. Two native German speakers were asked to form plurals from singular pseudo-nouns and nouns borrowed from French. The results suggest that it is possible a ‘rule’ exists for words which are noticeably borrowed from French. However, in the more common case, novel words which sounded similar to or reminded the native speakers of real German plurals were made plural in that way, even across speakers. This provides evidence for a frequency or instance-based account where generalizing from specifically experienced instances to new instances occurs based on the novel stems’ similarity to known instances.