Morphology beyond form: Lexical semantics can predict number decisions on German pseudo-nouns

The German nominal number system has been traditionally assumed to have a complex inflectional paradigm that operates solely on formal cues. Recent studies in the Discriminative Lexicon framework have shown, however, that nominal number inflection is influenced not only by form information but also by semantics. In this talk, we will put the Discriminative Lexicon framework to a test by investigating whether a discriminative learning model is able to predict the semantics of pseudo-words, and participants’ number decisions on such words in an experiment. We will see that semantics plays an important role in these decisions, analogously to real words examined in previous discriminative learning studies. These findings further support discriminative learning networks as a viable alternative to traditional structuralist approaches to morpho-phonological variation in inflectional paradigms.