The emergence of attraction errors during sentence comprehension

2.1. GRAMMATICAL NUMBER 23
the lexical entry must include the information whether or not the stem undergoes
umlaut. Mugdan (1977) assumes a feature "PL-UL" that indicates that the plural
stem exhibits an umlaut.
It is hard to decide which of the plural allomorphs is the regular default. In
fact, Bybee (1991) argued that German plural formation has no regular default.
Other authors give a list of rules each with an even longer list of exceptions (e.g.,
Duden, 2006; Mugdan, 1977). Nevertheless, there are certain morphosyntactic
and phonological regularities of plural formation (see for instance Bittner, 1994;
Eisenberg, 1998; Golston and Wiese, 1995), but there are considerable idiosyncrasies.
With respect to frequency, the German plural allomorphs are not equally
distributed. The most frequent suffix is -(e)n—with regard to type frequency as
well as with regard to token frequency (Bartke et al., 2005; Bartke, 1998; Clahsen
et al., 1996; Köpcke, 1988; Marcus et al., 1995; Sonnenstuhl-Henning, 2003, most
frequency data are based on the CELEX databank, cf. Baayen et al., 1993).
While plural -s is of non-native origin (cf. Augst, 1975; Öhmann, 1961) and
occurs only with a few native common nouns (e.g., Mädels ‘girls’), 14 it differs
from the other non-native plural allomorphs in that it is used as a default when
no other plural morpheme is possible (cf. Marcus et al., 1995; Mugdan, 1977).
Plural formation with -s is possible in various phonological environments: It
occurs after vowels (Zebras ‘zebras’), as well as after consonants (Details ‘details’),
both in stressed and in unstressed syllables. Despite its non-native origin
and low frequency, many researchers identify -s as the default plural allomorph
(e.g., Cahill and Gazdar, 1999; Kilbury, 2001; Marcus et al., 1995; Sonnenstuhl-
Henning, 2003), at least in the peripheral lexicon (e.g., Neef, 1998). 15 Although
loan words prefer in general -e and -(e)n plural formation, there seems to be a
tendency for newly borrowed loans to start with -s plural (Köpcke, 1993). Psycholinguistic
experiments show that -s is preferred when applied to a nonsense
word, in particular when the latter does not rhyme with any existing word (Bartke
et al., 1995; Köpcke, 1988, 1993; Marcus et al., 1995) and from acquisition studies
showing that -s is massively overgeneralized in child language (Bartke, 1998;
Clahsen et al., 1992). 16 Neurolinguistic evidence suggesting that -s is the default
plural marker comes from studies comparing brain responses to various incorrect
plural forms (Weyerts et al., 1997) and from aphasia studies (e.g., Penke, 1998).
strict sense (cf. Mugdan, 1977).
14 Plural -s occurs also with proper names (including product names like Golfs), onomatopoetic
words like Wauwaus (‘dogs’, literally ‘woof woofs’), acronyms like Demos (‘demonstrations’),
lexicalized phrases like Dreikäsehochs (‘titches’, literally ‘three cheeses high’) and other nominalizations.
15 A list of criteria is provided in Marcus et al. (1995).
16 For further psycholinguistic evidence for -s being the default plural allomorph see Marcus
et al. (1995) and Sonnenstuhl-Henning (2003).