Conditioning, but on Which Distribution? Grammatical Gender in German Plural Inflection

Kate McCurdy, Adam Lopez, Sharon Goldwater

Abstract: Grammatical gender is a consistent and informative cue to the plural class of German nouns. We find that neural encoder-decoder models learn to rely on this cue to predict plural class, but adult speakers are relatively insensitive to it. This suggests that the neural models are not an effective cognitive model of German plural formation.