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Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464
www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l
What ‘‘Mice Trap’’ tells us about the mental lexiconq
Carolyn J. Buck-Gengler,a,c,* Lise Menn,b,c and Alice F. Healya,c
a Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0345, USAb Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0295, USA
c Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0344, USA
Accepted 4 December 2003
Available online 8 February 2004
Abstract
Level ordering has proven inadequate as a morphological theory, leaving unexplained the experimental results taken to support it
as a component of innate grammar—young children�s acceptance of irregular plurals in English compounds. The present study
demonstrates that these results can be explained by slower access to the grammatically preferred singulars of irregular nouns when
compounds are created on-line from plural stimuli. Experiments on English noun–noun compound production and on production
of either singular or plural forms from the same or opposite form confirmed that more irregular than regular plurals were used in
compounds, and showed that producing irregular singulars from plurals was slower than producing regular singulars. Plural re-
sponses were also slower when cue and required response number differed.
� 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Inflectional morphology; Irregular noun plurals; Noun–noun compounds; Innateness; Level ordering
1. Introduction
The issue of regularity within inflectional morphology
has been an especially important area of research and
qThe research presented in this paper represents the main findings
from the first three experiments of the first author�s dissertation, whichwas conducted under the joint supervision of the other two authors.
More details may be found in the dissertation. We thank James Kole,
Erica Wohldmann, and Katrina Raybun for their assistance in scoring
the responses in Experiment 2, Jon Roberts and Ernest Mross for
programming assistance, David Underwood for preparing the picture
stimuli, and Holly Krech Thomas for recording the spoken words used
in Experiment 3. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for
insightful comments and suggestions, George Figgs for searching
CHILDES for noun–noun compounds, Charles Judd for statistics
advice, and Brian MacWhinney for advice on comparing frequencies.
This research was supported in part by Army Research Institute
Contracts DASW01-99-K-0002 and DASW01-03-K-0002 and Army
Research Office Grant DAAG55-98-1-0214 to the University of
Colorado. This research was also supported in part by a Student
Research Award from the Institute of Cognitive Science (University of
Colorado at Boulder).* Corresponding author. Fax: 1-303-492-8895.
E-mail address: [email protected] (C.J. Buck-
Gengler).
0093-934X/$ - see front matter � 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2003.12.001
debate about the nature of language representation and
even the innateness of language. A central aspect of this
debate concerns whether the linguistic description in-
volving a strict separation between regular and irregular
word formation is supported experimentally as a psy-
chological property of the mental lexicon.
The present study reexamines an early experiment(Gordon, 1985) on regular and irregular English noun
morphology, which has often been cited as support for
dual mechanism models (rules for regulars; rote memory
or an associative network for irregulars), innateness of
grammar, and level ordering of morphology (e.g., Ki-
parsky, 1982). In the experiments presented here, we
examine the possibility of an alternative, on-line pro-
cessing explanation for Gordon�s results.The regular/irregular distinction for English noun
morphology can be summarized as follows. Most nouns
take the regular orthographic -(e)s plural, phonologi-
cally /-s, -z, -�iz/. However, a number of nouns do not fit
that pattern. Mass/non-count nouns have no plural
form (e.g., corn). Irregular nouns include nouns with
zero plural (e.g., sheep), nouns of foreign origin that use
foreign plurals (e.g., stimulus/stimuli, analysis/analyses,
454 C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464
datum/data), and a small number of nouns that havesynchronically idiosyncratic plurals based on earlier
systematic changes that have been lost over time (e.g.,
mouse/mice, foot/feet). Semi-regular nouns (mostly end-
ing in /f/) add the -(e)s but change the final consonant
voicing (e.g., wife/wives, leaf/leaves); they were not used
in the present study or in Gordon�s (1985).Regularity/irregularity has consequences extending
beyond the choice of inflected form. In English noun–noun compound formation, the first noun must usually
be singular, but plurals of irregular nouns are more
acceptable in that position (e.g., Gordon, 1985; Kipar-
sky, 1982; Pinker, 1994, 1999). So, even when talking
about more than one rat or toy, one would not say *rats
catcher or *toys box. However, mice catcher is far more
acceptable. This dichotomy has been explained within
the theory of level ordering of morphology. Level or-dering is a feature of the theory of Lexical Phonology,
which is a generative attempt to formally capture and
unify many recurring patterns in the morphology and
phonology of the world�s languages. ‘‘The motivation
for setting up an independent stratum [level] in Lexical
Phonology is usually a convergence of morphological
and phonological facts. . .; a set of affixes. . .undergoesone set of phonological rules but not another’’ (Kaisse &Shaw, 1985, p. 10). These (morphological and phono-
logical) facts in turn result from events in the history of a
language over millennia.
In level ordering, assembly of words proceeds at
several ‘‘levels.’’ At Level 1, a base form (for almost all
English nouns, the singular) or another memorized form
(such as the irregular plural) is retrieved from the mental
lexicon. Unproductive derivations, especially those thatimpose phonological or stress changes in the stem, are
also found at Level 1. At Level 2, compounds are
formed and productive derivational affixes, such as un-,
-less, and -ly, are added. At Level 3, after compound
formation, regular affixes like the regular plural are
added. The normative English pattern that disprefers
*rats trap is explained by saying that the regular plural
rats is created too late (at Level 3) to be placed inside acompound (at Level 2). However, irregular plurals, be-
ing retrieved from memory at Level 1, are easily incor-
porated during compound formation, and thus should
be optionally allowed. Problems with exceptions to the
rule (e.g., civil rights commission, public works depart-
ment) have been explained by appeals to semantic and
syntactic factors (Kiparsky, 1982; Pinker, 1999).
Lexical Phonology is an account of linguistic struc-ture; it makes no claims about storage versus on-line
processing, nor about the formation of novel words and
compounds. Although level ordering has been shown to
have serious limitations for English and other languages
to which it has been applied (Bauer, 1990; Booij, 1992,
2002; Fabb, 1988; Haskell, MacDonald, & Seidenberg,
2003; Hay, 2002; Ramscar, 2002), some developmental
psycholinguists (Clahsen, 1999; Marcus, Brinkmann,Clahsen, Wiese, & Pinker, 1995) continue to rely on it or
its close relatives, perhaps for lack of an attractive
generative alternative.
1.1. Gordon (1985) and children’s compound formation in
English
Gordon (1985) explored compound formation in alanguage production experiment with English-speaking
children aged 3–5. The children were introduced to a
puppet with a voracious appetite (Cookie Monster).
Various objects that Cookie Monster might eat were
shown to each child. Each time the child was first asked
to name the object, then was asked, ‘‘What do you call
someone who eats X?’’ The children were trained to
answer with a noun–noun compound in the form of X-eater. The training items were English mass nouns,
which have no plurals in their basic senses. For each test
noun, the singular and plural of the noun were elicited in
turn by showing the child first one and then several of
the objects represented by the noun, and asking the child
to name what he or she saw. Whichever form of plural a
child gave (e.g., for the plural of mouse: mice, mouses,
mices) was used in the compound elicitation. The maintest words were five irregular nouns (mice, teeth, geese,
men, and feet) semantically matched with five regular
nouns (rats, beads, ducks, babies, and hands).
Gordon (1985) found that for regular nouns (and for
irregular nouns that were overregularized, e.g., mouses),
close to 100% of the compounds were formed with the
singular form for X in X-eater (e.g., rat-eater). On the
other hand, 90% of the irregular nouns for which a childhad produced the correct irregular plural received ir-
regular plural responses (e.g., mice-eater). In other
words, if the plural was ‘‘regular’’ (whether correct or
not), the singular was produced, but if the plural was
irregular, the plural was (almost always) produced.
These results matched the prediction of level ordering
that use of the plural would be optional for irregulars.
Gordon attributed the high rate of plural response forirregulars (90% rather than the random 50% rate that
the term ‘‘optional’’ suggests) to the fact that the chil-
dren always heard the plural of the first noun of the
compound just before they had to produce the com-
pound. Indeed, the linguistic notion of optionality
makes no predictions about the relative frequency of
choice among options or the factors that may influence
that choice.Gordon (1985) claimed that these results were strong
support for the innateness of the underlying grammar
(level ordering), because he also asserted, based on an
examination of compounds found in the Ku�cera and
Francis (1967) word list, that children only rarely hear
irregular plurals in compounds. Thus, children would
not have the opportunity to learn that irregular plurals
1 The orthographic change to ‘‘ies’’ for regular nouns ending in ‘‘y’’
is not likely to cause those regulars special problems: Phonologically,
which is how the words are first learned, there is no difference;
orthographically, this change is regular for this subclass of nouns.
Whether this subclass is treated differently remains to be tested
empirically.
C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464 455
are optionally allowed in compounds. He argued that ifa pattern cannot be learned from the input, then it must
be an ‘‘innate structural property of the lexicon’’ (Gor-
don, 1985, p. 73): Because children show a distinction
between regular and irregular nouns in this structure,
level ordering must be innate. This conclusion about
innateness has been repeated frequently elsewhere
(Clahsen, 1999; Hoff, 2001; Pinker, 1991, 1994, 1999).
However, we suggest that these findings are not dueto the operation of an innate grammar—a claim which is
already dubious in the face of purely linguistic counter-
evidence to the theory of level ordering already men-
tioned. Rather, they can be accounted for by on-line
processing demands interacting with a ‘‘soft’’ constraint:
The first element of a compound is singular, regardless
of whether the semantics has stimulated the retrieval of
a plural referent (e.g., toys, cookies). Thus, if a com-pound such as cookie jar is called for in a context where
plural cookies has been mentioned (‘‘Can we have some
cookies?’’), the primed cookies must be inhibited in fa-
vor of the singular before responding (‘‘Yes, they are in
the cookie jar.’’). We hypothesize that it is harder to
access the singular of an irregular noun from its plural
than it is to access the singular of a regular from its
plural. We will show that this is the case for adults;assuming that processing is similar in adults and chil-
dren, our study will also account for Gordon�s (1985)
findings. The ‘‘constraint’’ formulation does not require
invoking innate knowledge, because young children
have plenty of examples of this first-element-singular
pattern in their early years (e.g., toy box, raisin box, jelly
bean jar, cookie jar) and could well have adduced the
constraint by age 3, the youngest age that Gordon tes-ted. Children have also heard violations of that pattern
when the first noun has no singular (e.g., pluralia tantum
nouns such as clothes and eyeglasses); the CHILDES
database (MacWhinney, 2000) contains such forms in
language addressed to young children. Nouns like
clothes are not irregular, but forms like clothes-hanger
and glasses-case show that the first-element-singular
constraint is violable.As mentioned, in Gordon�s (1985) experiment the
children were always primed with the plural of the first
noun of the compound, right before they had to produce
the compound. On-line processes would therefore need
to retrieve the singular and/or inhibit the repetition of
the plural form to construct the noun–noun compound.
Either of these procedures would be more difficult for
irregular nouns—difficult enough that sometimes theseprocesses would not succeed before the output was
made. This difficulty should show up in two ways: First,
the already observed predilection of both adults and
children to produce (or at least accept) the irregular
plural noun in compounds more often than the regular
plural (predicted by both Gordon�s and our explana-
tions), and second, a longer time to produce such a
compound with a singular first noun when given an ir-regular plural as input (predicted by our explanation).
Indeed, for words that have a non-transparent rela-
tionship between their singular and plural forms, it
should be harder in general to produce the singular
when the plural is already in mind (or, for that matter,
to produce the plural when the singular is in mind).1
In summary, we make the following predictions: (a)
Irregular plurals will be produced in compounds moreoften than regular plurals; (b) it will take longer to
produce such a compound with a singular first noun
when given an irregular plural as input than it would
with other inputs; and (c) it will be harder in general to
produce either a singular or a plural form of a noun
when the opposite form is already in mind, especially for
words that have a formally non-transparent singular–
plural relationship.Three experiments examined these predictions. The
first two involved eliciting noun–noun compounds in
English; in Experiment 2 response times were also col-
lected. The third experiment used a task in which either
the singular or the plural of a noun was evoked by
means of a picture (a simple line drawing), and a num-
ber cue was given to signal which of the two forms
(singular or plural) was supposed to be produced;sometimes the evoked form and the required response
matched in number, and sometimes they did not match.
This task went beyond forming compounds in that both
singular and plural forms were explicitly required, rather
than just the singular (which is implicitly required in
English compound formation); thus participants� speedand accuracy changing the form in both directions, ra-
ther than just one, could be tested.
2. Experiments 1 and 2
The purpose of Experiments 1 and 2 was to test the
hypothesis that in the compound formation task it is
harder (and thus takes more time) to produce a singular
form immediately after seeing the plural form of an ir-regular noun than it is after seeing the singular form of
an irregular noun or either form of a regular noun. The
pattern of responses (both experiments) and the time to
respond (Experiment 2) were examined to address this
question. These experiments, though similar to that of
Gordon (1985), differed in several ways, one of which
was that whereas Gordon only prompted the children
with plurals in the X-eater questions, in Experiments 1
Table 1
Stimulus nouns (singular and plural forms) used in Experiments 1 and 2, by type
Irregular noun Regular noun
Semantic match Form match
Singular Plural Singular Plural Singular Plural
mouse micea rat ratsa nail nails
tooth teetha bead beadsa tape tapes
foot feeta hand handsa hat hats
goose geesea duck ducksa bell bells
man mena baby babiesa letter letters
louse lice fly flies knight knights
child children doll dolls chain chains
ox oxen horse horses ax axes
woman women monkey monkeys watch watches
fungus fungi fern ferns frog frogs
a From Gordon (1985).
3 See Gordon (1985) for a discussion of how semantically matched
nouns were selected.4
456 C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464
and 2 both singulars and plurals were used in the
prompts.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Participants
Twelve members of the Boulder community partici-
pated in Experiment 1 as volunteers; 24 University ofColorado students participated in Experiment 2 in par-
tial fulfillment of introductory psychology course re-
quirements. All were native speakers of English.
2.1.2. Materials
2.1.2.1. Target nouns. Three types of target nouns were
used (Table 1): irregular, semantically matched regular,
and form matched regular. We used the five irregularnouns and their semantic matches from Gordon (1985),
and added five more irregular nouns and their regular
semantic matches for greater generalizability across
items. A non-semantically related noun was also mat-
ched with each irregular noun. This third set of nouns
was chosen such that each regular noun started with a
phoneme that had acoustic onset characteristics similar
to the first phoneme of the corresponding irregularnoun. These restrictions were imposed in anticipation of
Experiment 2, in which the participants pronounced the
responses aloud and the response times were based on
the acoustic properties of the leading phoneme.2 Stimuli
in the experiment included both the singular and the
plural forms of each noun. A noun set is defined to be
the six nouns, singular and plural, associated with a
2 See Kessler, Treiman, and Mullennix (2002) for a review of
problems with voice key measurements. Precautions in creating the
stimuli for Experiments 1 and 2 were similar to the ones they
recommend.
particular irregular noun (e.g., the mouse noun set is
mouse, mice, rat, rats, nail, and nails).
All nouns were imageable and concrete. Semantic
match nouns were chosen to be semantically or per-
ceptually similar to the irregular noun with which they
were paired.3
In Experiment 1, 10 nouns of each type were used,
both singular and plural, for a total of 60 target nouns.In Experiment 2, all 60 nouns were used in trials, but
trials for the woman and fungus sets were later treated as
fillers (due to the difficulty of scoring the woman/women
trials and for balance considerations), resulting in 48
target nouns.
The lists were equated for frequency and word
length.4 To verify that the lists did not differ on fre-
quency, the lists were compared on lemma frequency,frequency of singulars, and frequency of plurals. Un-
paired t tests (both on the 10-set lists used in Experiment
1 and on the 8-set lists used in Experiment 2) indicated
no significant difference in frequency between the ir-
regular list and either matched regular list. Word length
was compared on number of letters, syllables, and
phonemes. Again, unpaired t tests indicated no signifi-
cant difference between the irregular list and eithermatched regular list.
2.1.2.2. Target trials. Fill-in-the-blank sentence frames
were used to elicit noun–noun compounds. Agentive
Two measures of frequency were used: lemma and form. Lemma
frequency is the frequency of all forms of the ‘‘word’’ for that part of
speech (Francis & Ku�cera, 1982). For a noun, the lemma includes the
singular, plural, possessive, and any special spellings or forms. If a
particular form (e.g., fly) is both a noun and a verb, only the count for
the noun was used. The form frequency used was the sum of the
frequencies for each sub-entry for the singular and the plural of each
noun lemma given in Francis and Ku�cera. Thus, frequencies used here
for singular and plural sum to the lemma frequency.
Fig. 1. Sentence frames and examples of stimuli in Experiments 1 and 2. Note. Exp., Experiment; Figure shows actual formatting of sentence frame
used in each Experiment.
C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464 457
(Experiment 1) and container (both experiments) frames
were used (see Fig. 1). Agentive frames resulted in
compounds ending in follower/catcher/painter/watcher,
and container frames resulted in compounds ending in
bowl/box/crate/tub.
2.1.3. Design
The dependent variables were the proportion of sin-
gular out of singular and plural responses and (in Ex-
periment 2) the time to produce a singular response (for
trials in which the response was singular). Factors (all
within-participant) were noun type (irregular, semantic
match regular, form match regular), stimulus nounnumber (singular, plural), and sentence frame (agentive,
container; Experiment 1 only). In Experiment 1, each
noun was seen once in the singular form and once in the
plural, for a total of 60 responses. In Experiment 2, each
of the 48 target nouns, both singular and plural forms,
was paired with each of the 4 containers, for a total of
192 scored responses. Results were analyzed with a
2� 2� 3 (Experiment 1) or a 2� 3 (Experiment 2) re-peated measures analysis of variance.
2.1.4. Procedure
2.1.4.1. Experiment 1. Participants saw 60 fill-in-the-
blank sentence frames and completed noun–noun com-
pounds by writing the first noun of the compound,
based on the target noun in the sentence. Sentences were
presented 10 to a page; each noun was used once as atarget, with either the agentive frame or the container
frame (counterbalanced across participants; each saw 30
of each type of frame).
2.1.4.2. Experiment 2. First, participants were familiar-
ized with the individual target, container, and practice
words and the response procedure; they saw each word
twice in two different pseudorandom orders for 152
training trials. They were then tested on fill-in-the-blanksentence frames to which they responded with noun–
noun compounds; responses were spoken, with response
times collected by a computer using a voice key. Stimuli
were presented on iMac computers using PsyScope
(Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993); re-
sponses were tape-recorded. Each target noun was
paired with each of the four containers. Test trials elic-
iting compounds were intermixed with single-wordtrials. There were 240 compound-forming trials inter-
spersed with 360 single-word trials. The intended re-
sponse for compound trials was the whole compound,
using a form of the target noun and the container as the
two nouns of the compound. Responses were scored
from the tape recording based on the grammatical
number of the target noun: singular, plural, or other (if
a word other than the singular or plural of the targetnoun was used); trials scored as ‘‘other’’ were excluded
from the data analyses.
Trials were self-paced. For each trial, whether single
word or compound-forming, first a black dot was
shown. When the participant was ready to proceed, he
or she pressed the space bar causing the dot to disappear
and the stimulus to be shown. The stimulus word or
sentence was centered on the computer screen usingblack 12 pt Chicago font. When the participant re-
sponded, the computer registered the response via the
voice key; the time was recorded; the stimulus disap-
peared and was replaced by a red asterisk indicating that
Fig. 2. Proportion of singular responses by noun type and grammatical
number of the stimulus noun in Experiment 1. Note. Error bars pro-
vided in each figure show standard errors of the mean. The reader
should note, however, that the standard errors of the mean indicate the
between-subjects variability, so they actually do not inform us about
the comparisons between the means involving within-subject factors.
458 C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464
the response was registered; and then the black dotsignaling the next trial appeared. If the participant did
not speak loudly enough for the response to register, the
stimulus did not disappear, and he or she would have to
respond again to get the asterisk feedback. Those trials
(apparent on the sound recording) were eliminated from
the analyses.
2.2. Results
In general, results not reaching the .05 level of sig-
nificance are not reported for any of the experiments.
(For more complete results including additional analy-
ses not reported here, please see Buck-Gengler, 2003.)
The stimulus items in each of the Experiments are
taken from a natural language, and not randomly gen-
erated or chosen. Nevertheless, ANOVAs were com-puted both with participants (F1) and with word set (F2)as the random effect. A composite min F 0 (Clark, 1973;Raaijmakers, Schrijnemakers, & Gremmen, 1999) was
computed on the basis of F1 and F2 for each analysis.
Effects are reported as significant based on min F 0;however, a note is made in cases where min F 0 does notreach significance but one or both of F1 and F2 are sig-
nificant at the a¼ .05 level. When means are reported(either in the text or in a figure), they are from the par-
ticipant analysis. The min F 0 tests should indicate whe-
ther effects are specific to the items or might generalize,
but they should not be taken to imply that items were
selected randomly, because in most cases there was ac-
tually very little choice of items that fit all requirements.
2.2.1. Experiment 1
The main question of Experiment 1 was: Under what
circumstances did participants not use the singular form
of the stimulus noun? As one would expect, the singular
response was given significantly less often overall when
the stimulus noun was plural (M ¼ :904) than when
the stimulus noun was singular (M ¼ :988)[min F 0ð1; 15Þ ¼ 8:75, p ¼ :010; F1ð1; 11Þ ¼ 10:52,MSE ¼ :024, p ¼ :008; F2ð1; 9Þ ¼ 52:01, MSE ¼ :003,p < :001]. Also, as expected, the response was singular
significantly less often when the stimulus noun was an
irregular noun (M ¼ :842) than when the stimulus noun
was either a semantic match regular (M ¼ 1:000) or a
form match regular (M ¼ :996) [min F 0ð2; 39Þ ¼ 8:82,p < :001; F1ð2; 22Þ ¼ 14:35, MSE ¼ :027, p < :001;F2ð2; 18Þ ¼ 22:92, MSE ¼ :011, p < :001]. Post hoc
Newman–Keuls tests on the analysis with participants asthe random effect confirmed that the proportion of
singular responses for irregular nouns differed from
those for regular nouns, but the response proportions
did not differ between the two types of regular nouns.
Most interestingly, the interaction (see Fig. 2)
between number and noun type was significant
[min F 0ð2; 31Þ ¼ 7:92, p ¼ :002; F1ð2; 22Þ ¼ 9:72, MSE ¼
:024, p < :001; F2ð2; 18Þ ¼ 42:61, MSE ¼ :003, p < :001]:When the trial contained an irregular plural stimulus
noun, the response was singular only 72.0% of the time,
whereas the singular was used between 96.5 and 100% of
the time for the remaining five combinations of number
and noun type.Sentence frame did not interact significantly with any
other factors by the min F 0 statistic; however, the in-
teraction of sentence frame and noun type was signifi-
cant for both the analysis with participants and the
analysis with word sets as the random effect [min F 0ð2;39Þ ¼ 2:81, p ¼ :073; F1ð2; 22Þ ¼ 5:97, MSE ¼ :004, p ¼:009, F2ð2; 18Þ ¼ 5:30,MSE ¼ :002, p ¼ :016]. This resultreflects the fact that the agentive frame (e.g., X-watcher)had more singular responses than the container frame
(e.g., X-box) for irregular noun trials [agentiveM ¼ :877,container M ¼ :808] but not for trials with either type
of regular noun [agentive, semantic match M ¼ 1:000,agentive, form match M ¼ :992, container, semantic
match M ¼ 1:000, container, form match M ¼ 1:000].This semantic effect is interesting but not of primary
interest here; see Pinker (1999, pp. 181–186) for discus-sion of semantic factors affecting the acceptability of
plurals as first elements in compounds.
2.2.2. Experiment 2
Experiment 2 examined response time (RT) as well as
response preferences. Does it take longer to produce
a singular first noun response when the stimulus is an
irregular plural than when it is a regular plural, anirregular singular, or a regular singular?
2.2.2.1. Proportion of trials with singular first noun
responses. The first analysis examined how many re-
sponses used a singular first noun (out of responses that
C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464 459
were either singular or plural), no matter what thegrammatical number of the stimulus. Whereas .921 of all
semantic match trials and .932 of all form match trials
were responded to with the singular form of that noun,
only .604 of all trials with an irregular target noun
were responded to with the singular form
[min F 0ð2; 50Þ ¼ 73:45, p < :001; F1ð2; 46Þ ¼ 127:17,MSE ¼ :013, p < :001; F2ð2; 14Þ ¼ 173:87, MSE ¼ :003,p < :001]. Of trials with a singular target noun, .992 ofthe responses were also singular, whereas only .646 of
the trials with a plural target noun were responded to
with the singular form [min F 0ð1; 25Þ ¼ 69:68, p < :001;F1ð1; 23Þ ¼ 72:91, MSE ¼ :053, p < :001; F2ð1; 7Þ ¼1573:46, MSE ¼ :001, p < :001].
Again, what is interesting is the interaction between
these two factors [min F 0ð2; 55Þ ¼ 68:64, p < :001;F1ð2; 46Þ ¼ 107:78, MSE ¼ :014, p < :001; F2ð2; 14Þ ¼189:04, MSE ¼ :003, p < :001]. As can be seen in
Fig. 3A, when the trial contained an irregular plural
target noun, the response was the singular form only
22.3% of the time (individual participants ranged from 0
to 87.1% singular responses). For all five of the other
combinations, the singular form was used between 85.7
Fig. 3. Results for Experiment 2. (A) Proportion of singular response
by noun type and grammatical number of the stimulus noun. (B)
Response times in ms for singular responses.
and 99.2% of the time. This result confirms earlierfindings, notably those of Gordon (1985), that irregular
plurals are readily produced orally as the first noun of
noun–noun compounds in response to this type of elic-
itation frame.
2.2.2.2. RTs to singular first noun responses. The RT
analysis examined the time to respond in ms with a
singular form to sentences containing either singular orplural irregular target nouns (e.g., to respond mouse box
when shown either ‘‘a BOX for transporting a MOUSE
is a ______’’ or ‘‘a BOX for transporting MICE is a
______’’), compared to the time to respond with a sin-
gular form to sentences containing either a singular or
plural regular target noun (e.g., to respond rat box when
shown either ‘‘a BOX for transporting a RAT is a
______’’ or ‘‘a BOX for transporting RATS is a______’’). This analysis included only those trials in
which the response was singular; thus fewer trials con-
tributed to the irregular plural cell than to the other cells
(as seen in Fig. 3A). Seven participants responded with a
plural 100% of the time when given an irregular plural
stimulus, and their data were excluded from the RT
analysis. To minimize the problem of skewness of RT
data, the RTs reported from each participant in each cellare the median RTs for that cell. Because medians were
used, no special action was taken with outliers.
RTs for semantic match (695ms) and form match
(691ms) trials were significantly faster than those for the
irregular trials (809ms) [min F 0ð2; 44Þ ¼ 9:71, p < :001;F1ð2; 32Þ ¼ 15:90, MSE ¼ 961, p < :001; F2ð2; 14Þ ¼24:93, MSE ¼ 272, p < :001]. RTs for singular-stimulus
trials (687ms) were significantly faster than for plural-stimulus trials (777ms) [min F 0ð1; 22Þ ¼ 14:52, p ¼ :001;F1ð1; 16Þ ¼ 24:13, MSE ¼ 8658, p < :001; F2ð1; 7Þ ¼36:48, MSE ¼ 2633, p < :001]. Again, the key result is
that the interaction between these factors, seen in
Fig. 3B, was significant [min F 0ð2; 45Þ ¼ 7:9, p ¼ :001;F1ð2; 32Þ ¼ 12:82, MSE ¼ 9303, p < :001; F2ð2; 14Þ ¼20:56, MSE ¼ 2550, p < :001]. The irregular plural
stimuli had the slowest RT; all other forms were re-sponded to much more quickly. As in Experiment 1,
post hoc tests confirmed that there was no difference in
either measure between the two kinds of regular nouns.
2.3. Discussion
Gordon�s (1985) result that plural is used more often
when the immediately preceding noun is an irregularplural than a regular plural (or a singular) was replicated
in Experiments 1 and 2; the proportion of plural re-
sponses to irregular plural stimuli was greater in the
faster oral response task of Experiment 2 compared
to the slower written response task of Experiment 1. In
fact, seven participants in Experiment 2 always
responded with the plural in that case. Moreover, in
Table 2
Irregular and matched regular nouns, both singular and plural forms,
used as stimuli in Experiment 3
Irregular noun Regular noun
Singular Plural Singular Plural
child children car cars
foot feet fork forks
goose geese gun guns
louse lice letter letters
man men match matches
mouse mice moon moons
ox oxen owl owls
tooth teeth tree trees
460 C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464
Experiment 2 we found that even when the singular wassuccessfully produced, it took longer when the preceding
noun was an irregular plural than for any other type of
noun. Therefore, preference for producing irregular
plurals as first elements of compounds in such elicitation
tasks can be explained by processing difficulty: goose is
harder to access from geese than duck is from ducks (as
might be predicted by, e.g., Allen & Badecker, 2002, or
Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). The delay in producing‘‘goose crate’’ as a response to ‘‘a crate for carrying
geese is a ____’’ is not predicted by an account that
simply translates the ordered steps of a generative model
into real time operations. Indeed, since Savin and
Perchonock (1965), attempts to translate generative
models directly into sequences of psycholinguistic op-
erations have been shown to be inadequate.
5 Because responses were typed, accuracy in Experiment 3 is a
different type of measure from the proportion of singular responses
measure in Experiments 1 and 2. Most errors in Experiment 3 were
either typos or errors that might indicate that the participant first
intended one form but then changed mid-word and corrected to the
other form. Typing the complete wrong form without typographical
error was extremely rare.
3. Experiment 3
Experiments 1 and 2 showed that in the context of
compound formation it was not only less likely but also
slower to produce a singular from a plural when the
stimulus was irregular than when it was regular. Ex-
periment 3 tests the more general hypothesis that it ismore difficult to produce either the singular or the plural
when the opposite form is in mind, and that this diffi-
culty is greater with irregulars than with regulars. This
hypothesis does not bear directly on level ordering, but
on the plausibility of our alternative account for the use
of irregular plural modifiers in compounds.
3.1. Method
3.1.1. Participants
Sixteen University of Colorado students participated
in Experiment 3 in partial fulfillment of introductory
psychology course requirements. All were native
speakers of English and had not participated in the
earlier experiments.
3.1.2. Materials
The stimulus nouns used in Experiment 3 (Table 2)
were the singulars and plurals of the eight irregular
nouns used in Experiment 2, along with eight regular
nouns matched on length, frequency, and first letter, for
a total of 32 words. Lists were equated on length (in
letters and syllables) and frequency as in Experiments 1
and 2, and were found by unpaired t tests to not differ onthose factors. Pictures of both one and several of each
item were used as stimuli. (Most ‘‘plural’’ pictures were
of two of the item, although some had three or four of
the item; the picture for teeth was of a set of teeth.) In the
main task, each picture was accompanied by a number
cue (either ‘‘one ____’’ or ‘‘four ____’’) to indicate that
the required response was either singular or plural.
3.1.3. Design
The main dependent measures were accuracy, initia-
tion time, and response time per letter. Accuracy was
defined as typing all letters correctly with no backspac-
ing and with the same grammatical number as the re-
sponse number cue. Only trials scored as accurate were
included in the response time analyses.5 Initiation time
was the time in ms taken to type the first letter of theresponse, measured from the time the stimulus was
presented on the screen. RT per letter was computed by
taking the total time in ms to type the word (measured
from the time the picture and number cue were pre-
sented on the screen through the time to respond with
the final letter of the word, but not including the ENTERENTER
key) and dividing by the number of letters in the word;
this adjusted measure allows the direct comparison ofRTs for words of different lengths.
Each analysis is a 2� 2� 2 repeated measures anal-
ysis of variance. The three factors, required response
(singular or plural), match condition (does the gram-
matical number of the word or picture part of the
stimulus match the required response number), and
noun type (regular, irregular), were varied within par-
ticipants in the participant analysis. In the item analysis,required response and match condition were varied
within item, and noun type was varied between items.
3.1.4. Procedure
First, participants were familiarized with the set of
pictures and their associated words. They saw each
picture separately with its word, and typed the word; the
entire set was repeated twice in two different randomorders.
C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464 461
In the main task each stimulus picture was crossedwith each response number cue, giving a total of 64
trials. A trial consisted of a picture cue and a number
cue; the participant typed the word associated with the
picture but matching the number cue (required re-
sponse) in grammatical form. Thus, if a picture of four
trees was shown along with ‘‘one ____,’’ the required
response was ‘‘tree.’’ In half of the trials, the gram-
matical number of the picture and required responsematched, and in half they did not. See Fig. 4 for ex-
amples of main task trials.
Stimuli were presented on an iMac computer using a
program written in RealBasic, and responses were
typed; pressing the ENTERENTER key concluded the entry.
(Half of the participants also heard the word matching
the picture pronounced, and the other half did not;
however, this factor did not influence any preliminary
Fig. 4. Example screen shots of the main task in Experiment 3. (A)
Match trial—both picture and required response number are plural. (B)
Mismatch trial—picture is plural, required response number is singular.
analyses and therefore was dropped from the analysesreported here.)
3.2. Results
As in Experiment 2, medians of response times were
used to eliminate any effects of skewness of response
time data.
3.2.1. Accuracy
The overall proportion of correct responses was .856.
None of the main effects were significant. The only in-
teraction approaching significance by the min F 0 statistic(actually significant in both the participants and the
items analyses) for this measure was between noun type
and response number, as shown in Fig. 5A [min F 0ð1;21Þ ¼ 3:76, p ¼ :066; F1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 18:87, MSE ¼ :009,p < :001; F2ð1; 14Þ ¼ 4:69, MSE ¼ :019, p ¼ :048]. For
irregular nouns, plural responses were more accurate
than singular responses, whereas for regular nouns, the
opposite was true. These differences were also signifi-
cant by paired t tests [irregular nouns: tð15Þ ¼ �4:038,p ¼ :001; regular nouns: tð15Þ ¼ 2:837, p ¼ :013]. No
other interactions were significant.
3.2.2. Initiation time
Regular nouns (M ¼ 1083ms) were initiated more
quickly than irregular nouns (M ¼ 1272ms) [min F 0ð1;22Þ ¼ 9:17, p ¼ :006; F1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 38:41, MSE¼ 29,613,
p < :001; F2ð1; 14Þ ¼ 12:05, MSE¼ 42,566, p ¼ :004],and responses were initiated more quickly when the
numbers matched (M ¼ 1142ms) than when they did
not (M ¼ 1212ms) [min F 0ð1; 25Þ ¼ 4:26, p ¼ :0496;F1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 6:00, MSE¼ 26,315, p ¼ :027; F2ð1; 14Þ ¼14:73, MSE ¼ 5884, p ¼ :002]; singular responses (M ¼1160ms) tended to be initiated faster than plural
responses (M ¼ 1194ms), although this difference was
not significant by min F 0 and only marginally significant
by participants and items [min F 0ð1; 29Þ ¼ 1:88, p ¼:181; F1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 3:97, MSE ¼ 9399, p ¼ :065; F2ð1; 14Þ¼ 3:57, MSE¼ 10,081, p ¼ :080]. None of the interac-tions were significant.
3.2.3. Time per letter
The letters of regular nouns (405ms) were typed
faster than those for irregular nouns (459ms), but this
effect was significant by participants only [min F 0ð1; 16Þ¼ 2:52, p ¼ :132; F1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 46:36, MSE ¼ 2040, p <:001; F2ð1; 14Þ ¼ 2:67, MSE¼ 23,522, p ¼ :125].6 Extraresponse time per letter was needed when the gram-
matical numbers did not match (448ms) beyond the
time taken when they did match (416ms) [min F 0
6 In general, when the participant analyses but not the item
analyses were significant, the results held for some of the items but did
not generalize across items.
Fig. 5. Results for Experiment 3. (A) Interaction between noun type
and required response number for accuracy measure. (B) Interaction
between noun type and required response for response time per letter
measure. (C) Interaction (marginal) between noun type and match
condition for response time per letter measure.
462 C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464
ð1; 29Þ ¼ 6:14, p ¼ :019; F1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 12:29, MSE ¼ 2557,p ¼ :003; F2ð1; 14Þ ¼ 12:29, MSE ¼ 1332, p ¼ :004].There was no difference in the typing speed of letters in
singular versus plural responses.
Noun type interacted significantly (by participants
only) with required response number as can be seen in
Fig. 5B [min F 0ð1; 17Þ < 1; F1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 5:98, MSE ¼2908, p ¼ :027; F2ð1; 14Þ < 1]. For irregular nouns, it
took less time on average to type letters of the singularsthan of the plurals; but for regular nouns, the letters
were typed more quickly on average in plurals than in
singulars. Individual t tests comparing the times for
singular and plural for each noun type reveal that for
irregulars, the 15ms difference between the singular and
plural forms was not significant, whereas for regulars,
the 31ms difference between singulars and plurals was
significant [tð15Þ ¼ 3:683, p ¼ :002]. One reason for thisdifference is that the time for the extra -s on regular
plurals was always shorter than the overall average time
per letter, because of the contribution of the response
time for the first letter (which was always longer). By
comparing panels A and B of Fig. 5, we see that sing-
ulars are both slower and more accurate than plurals for
regulars, whereas the opposite is true for irregulars,
hinting at the possibility of a speed-accuracy trade-off. However, there is no other evidence of such a
tradeoff because there are no other significant effects of
accuracy.
As noted, the main effects of noun type and match
were both significant (although noun type was signifi-
cant only by participants). The interaction between these
two factors approached significance, but only by par-
ticipants [min F 0ð1; 14Þ < 1; F1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 3:23, MSE ¼987, p ¼ :092; F2ð1; 14Þ < 1]. As can be seen in Fig. 5C,
the extra response time needed when cue and response
numbers did not match was greater for irregular nouns
(41ms) than for regular nouns (21ms). Both differences
were significant by paired t tests [irregular: tð15Þ ¼ 3:56,p ¼ :003; regular: tð15Þ ¼ 2:30, p ¼ :036].
3.3. Discussion
The main result of this experiment is that additional
time is required to generate the correct response when
the picture number and response number do not match
relative to when they do; this additional time to respond
tends to be even longer for irregular nouns than it is for
regular nouns. The interaction between match and reg-
ularity was reduced in Experiment 3 when the task wasmade bi-directional to isolate the process of producing
the opposite form from a given form. It is likely that the
task demand of going in both directions made it hard
enough for regulars that the difference between match
and mismatch showed up in Experiment 3 for regulars
where it did not in Experiment 2. These results are not as
strong as those of Experiment 2, but still are compatible
with, and add to, the results from Experiments 1 and 2.Irregular noun singulars and plurals differ more from
each other than do regular noun singulars and plurals,
and they do so in a variety of ways. If that difference has
any effect at all in on-line processing, it is more likely to
make it harder to access the opposite form when it dif-
fers more, and more unpredictably, resulting in longer
response times.
C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464 463
4. General discussion
The experiments reported here and our interpreta-
tions of them lead us to the following conclusions:
1. The response pattern reported by Gordon (1985) was
previously interpreted as the automatic result of prop-
erties of an innate lexical structure, because it would
otherwise require children to use an unlearnable op-
tional rule—‘‘form all noun–noun compounds with asingular first element, except that the plural may op-
tionally be used for irregular first nouns.’’ The option-
ality of the rule was argued to be unlearnable because
of lack of relevant input.We argue that this English re-
sponse pattern, which we replicated in adults, can be
equallywell accounted for by a soft constraint—‘‘avoid
plural as the modifying element in a noun–noun com-
pound,’’ abbreviated *Npl +N. There is ample evi-dence for this constraint in language addressed to
children under three years of age. There are also many
instances of violations of the constraint in children�s in-put (e.g., clothes-hamper). The constraintmakes no ref-
erence to regularity or irregularity.
2. Complying with *Npl +N in a situation where Npl
has been aroused by hearing it, as in Experiment 2,
is slower for irregular than for regular nouns, sug-gesting either that (a) there is a competition between
the plural (e.g., geese) and the singular (e.g., goose)
for irregulars only, and/or (b) that the production
system is delayed while waiting for the irregular sin-
gular to be activated. Occasional second thoughts ev-
ident in the spoken protocols (‘‘lice box or louse
box’’) also suggest that the RT delay might result
from competition and mutual inhibition between‘‘lice-box’’ and ‘‘louse-box.’’
3. However, producing a plural modifier, thus violating
*Npl +N when Npl has just been heard (a violation
that almost never happens unless Npl is irregular)
does not delay output (Buck-Gengler, 2003). The
arousal of the singular of an irregular plural must
therefore be relatively slow, because otherwise we
would expect competition between the singular andthe plural to delay the response in the violation case
as well as in the compliance case. Therefore, the ma-
jor reason for the RT delay in experimental settings
appears to be slow arousal of the singular of an irreg-
ular plural, rather than competition between the al-
ready aroused plural and the singular.
4. The written responses (Experiment 1) yield far fewer
irregular plural first elements than oral responses (Ex-periment 2), even though the oral responding was
self-paced. Conscious self-monitoring may be in-
volved in compliance with the constraint when plural
irregular nouns are involved; as mentioned, in the
oral response task, several speakers made self-correc-
tions (which were not counted as responses). Note
again the extreme variability among participants in
Experiment 2, who ranged from only 12.9 to 100% ir-regular plural responses.
5. Typed naming responses to a pictured single or multi-
ple-image stimulus with a simultaneous number cue
(Experiment 3) were slower when the number cue
did not match the number of images. This finding
suggests that semantic arousal of noun number (sin-
gular or plural) from looking at an image is at least
as rapid as interpreting the words ‘‘one’’ or ‘‘four.’’6. The additional slowing for irregular singular-picture-
to-typed-plural-name or plural-picture-to-typed-
singular name suggests even more strongly that the
semantic arousal of an irregular noun specifies the
lemma fully marked for number, increasing the plau-
sibility that the plural of a modifying noun may be
aroused semantically (in spite of the grammatical
constraint preferring the singular form) in ordinarycommunication, as well as in experimental settings.
A reviewer suggests that these extra slow number-
mismatch responses could be due to the design, where
3/4 of the responses (the number-match responses
and the regular-noun mismatch responses) can be ini-
tiated by using the following strategy: Start to pro-
duce a stem form that might be either the plural or
the singular (e.g., duck-), and inhibit the plural suffixbefore it is typed. This potential option is not avail-
able for any of our irregulars except oxen (and chil-
dren when typing), because all the other irregulars
we used have a vowel change on their second pho-
neme. The same strategy—begin production without
worrying about the number, then inhibit the plural
affix if it is not appropriate—might possibly apply
to the much faster oral responses in Experiment 2.But this strategy does not invalidate the conclusion
that accessing irregular forms opposite in number
from the form initially aroused takes extra time.
A factor not tested explicitly (due to the nature of the
English plural paradigm), but which is intimately tied up
in English with the regular/irregular dichotomy, is the
overwhelming frequency of the regular plural morpheme
itself. The frequency of the regular morpheme, coupledwith its ease of segmentability, probably contributes a
great deal to regular singulars being so easy to produce
(Bybee, 1995), rather than a difference in regular versus
irregular, or rule use versus memory lookup. In other
languages (e.g., German) there is more than one para-
digm for forming plurals, and what is ‘‘regular’’ may be
fairly rare compared to some of the other paradigms
(Marcus et al., 1995). Languages such as German aretherefore better suited to tease out the contribution of
frequency from that of matching.
Do the differences between irregular and regular
nouns found here argue in favor of a strict dichotomy
between the two types of words? By no means. First,
nothing here argues against the possibility that fre-
quently used inflected forms are stored, or that linkages
464 C.J. Buck-Gengler et al. / Brain and Language 90 (2004) 453–464
between the stem and the plural affix are strengthenedeach time a word is used with that inflection. Second, we
have deliberately avoided semi-regulars like wife and
leaf, mentioned earlier. It is quite possible that a suffi-
ciently sensitive design would show that their behavior is
intermediate between the regulars and the irregulars
(see, e.g., Haskell et al., 2003). If intermediate behavior
exists, a model that posits a dichotomy between storage
of inflected forms and on-line attachment of inflectionalendings (whether or not frequently used inflected forms
might be stored) would not be adequate; one would need
a model where the predictability of the form relation-
ships between singular and plural could play a role.
What does the production of ‘‘mice trap’’ (and
‘‘mouse trap’’) tell us about the mental lexicon? We see
these results as putting constraints on the theories that
are used to explain the dichotomy between regular andirregular inflections. It is no longer sufficient to ascribe
the results of compound formation to level ordering or
similar generative theories. Any explanation must also
provide for differences in processing time. Processing
time differences, as well as the choice in form, may be
due to differences in segmentability or overlap between
the forms; morpheme frequency also may play a role.
None of these explanations depend on regularity. Re-search in other languages, with other paradigms (e.g.,
verb past tense), and with other kinds of tasks is nec-
essary to clarify the contributions of these factors.
In conclusion, the preference for irregular plural as
first element of noun–noun compounds can be explained
by a processing factor (the accessibility of the singular
from the plural) that affects all speakers. No appeal to
innate grammar is required to explain the similaritybetween child and adult performance on this aspect of
linguistic behavior.
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