Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Connectionist models of language equate default inflection {e.g., fax-faxed) with high frequency, while symbolic models compute regular inflection through the application of a mental rule which is independent of high frequency. The German -S plural is low frequency (7.2% of types) but in an experiment with novel nouns, w e show that -s behaves as a default. This argues against the connectionist model of inflection, but in favor of symbolic models.