The /s/ morpheme and the compounding phenomenon in English.

Abstract

Compound words with irregular plural nouns in first position (e.g. mice-eater) are produced far more frequently than compound words with regular plural nouns in first position (e.g. *rats-eater), (Gordon, 1985). Using empirical evidence and neural net modelling, the studies presented here demonstrate how a single route, associative memory based account might provide an equally, if not more, valid explanation of this phenomenon than the standard dual mechanism based theory (Marcus, Brinkmann, Clahsen, Weise & Pinker, 1995).