No default plural marker in Modern High German

In the current article, 24 nonce words with or without rhymes in the German language were analyzed in respect to the distribution of plural allomorphs in the pluralizations of native speakers. The influence of several intralinguistic variables on the choice of plural markers was assessed: grammatical gender, word final phonemes, classification of nonce words as those having or not having rhymes in German, plural markers of the rhyming real words, unusual orthography, final-obstruent devoicing, and the possibility of umlauting. Also, inter-individual differences between test subjects as well as their age were included as independent variables. In generalized linear mixed models with plural allomorphs as dependent variables, grammatical gender and presence of vowels that can be subject to umlauting tended to yield significant results (ps < .05). The study reanalyzed the results presented in the well-known article by Marcus et al. (“German inflection: The exception that proves the rule”. Cognitive Psychology 29, 1995, 189-256) by means of utilization of the same test items, but with a different study design and a new sample of adult German native speakers (N = 585). Contrary to Marcus et al. (1995), the present study allows to draw the conclusion that single-route models can account better for the distribution of plural markers than dual-route models