Running head: DUTCH PLURAL INFLECTION Dutch Plural Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Analogy

We develop the view that inflection is driven partly by non-phonological analogy and that non-phonological information is of particular importance to the inflection of non-canonical roots, which in the view of Marcus, Brinkmann, Clahsen, Wiese and Pinker (1995) are inflected by a symbolic rule process. We used the Dutch plural to evaluate these claims. An analysis of corpus data shows that a model using non-phonological information (orthography) produces significantly fewer errors on plurals of non-canonical Dutch nouns, in particular borrowings, than a model that includes only phonological information. Moreover, we show that a double default system, as proposed by Pinker (1999), does not offer an advantage over the latter model. A second study, examining the use of orthography in an online plural production task, shows that, in Dutch, the chosen pseudoword plural is significantly affected by non-phonological information. A final simulation study confirms that these results are in line with a model of inflectional morphology that explains the inflection of non-canonical roots by non-phonological analogy instead of a default rule process. Dutch Plural Inflection 2