Mice Trap: A New Explanation for Irregular Plurals in Noun-Noun Compounds

In an experiment eliciting noun-noun compounds, participants were more likely to produce plural nouns in the first position (e.g., mice trap) when presented with an irregular plural in the stimulus (e.g., a trap for catching mice is a _____) than when presented with stimuli containing regular plurals (e.g., a trap for catching rats is a _____). When they did produce a normatively correct singular (e.g., mouse trap) in response to a stimulus with an irregular plural, response time was longer than it was for producing a singular response to stimuli containing singulars or regular plurals. This finding suggests a priming-based processing problem in producing the singulars of irregular plurals in this paradigm. Such a problem is likely also to be present in young children, which would explain their production of forms like mice trap (Gordon, 1985; Pinker, 1994) without requiring recourse to the hypothesis that they have innate grammatical knowledge.