| Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft

New publication by Frank Domahs

How do we actually know that the can is only one (singular), while the foxes are several (plural)? In this study, we show that morphological processing works without morphemes. So whether the -e in Büchse belongs to the "stem", but the -e in Füchse is an "ending", would not be so important.

We were able to show that a cognitively plausible model based on the principle of "discriminative learning" can successfully distinguish between singular and plural forms. This model does not need to know any morphemes (e.g. endings or umlauts). Rather, it successfully learns to distinguish between singular and plural forms in German solely on the basis of sound combinations (biphones). The model was also able to reproduce the performance pattern of a patient with a speech disorder when distinguishing singular and plural forms.

Plag, I., Heitmeier, M., & Domahs, F. (2024). German nominal number interpretation in an impaired mental lexicon - A naive discriminative learning perspective. The Mental Lexicon. doi.org/10.1075/ml.23017.pla

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Frank Domahs
Prof. Dr. Frank Domahs
Professorship for Applied Linguistics - Psycholinguistics
(Department of Linguistics)
C23 – staff building 1 / Raum 906
+49-361-7374391
frank.domahs@uni-erfurt.de
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