Why children sometimes say “mice-eater”

Do the production patterns of plural forms in noun-noun compounds reveal the workings of innate constraints that govern morphological processing? Gordon (1985) claims that the fact that children in elicitation tasks produce “rat-eater" but “mice-eater” to describe monsters that eat either rats or mice is evidence for a structural constraint on word formation that prevents regularly inflected forms from entering compounds. This paper re-examines the claim that adults and children ordinarily describe an eater of mice as a "mice-eater". Contrary to the nativist claim that people say "mice-eater" because they lack an innate constraint to prevent them from doing so, it is found that once lexical priming is controlled for, even children describe a monster that eats mice as a "mouseeater", which is in keeping with the kind of forms that they encounter in the input.