On memory and computation: a reappraisal of German noun plural inflection

The talk "On memory and computation: a reappraisal of German noun plural inflection" presented one of the main objectives on which the bilateral Italian-Belgian action is focussing, namely linguistic and extra-linguistic factors involved in mono- and bi-lingual word recognition. She suggests a multi-factorial view of morphology adaptive processing, in presenting a usage-based perspective, by investigating a few properties of the German noun plural system and focusing on the dynamic relation between regularity, productivity and competition of inflection patterns through computer simulations (Temporal Self-Organising Maps - TSOMs) of type/token-frequency effects. In detail, she highlighted a few formal properties of the -s plural class, and concluded that although relatively infrequent, -s plurals seem to pattern in fairly regular sub-classes which suffer from no competition by members of other inflectional classes.