In her valuable commentary, Kerkhoff raises several issues, both empirical and conceptual. In particular, she argues that morphophonological regularities represented in associative memory might suffice for the acquisition of French grammatical gender. She thus questions whether a default implemented as a rule is necessary and whether it is even…

Because the spelling of many words in the English language (and in many other languages as well) depends on their morphemic structure, children have to have some knowledge about morphemes in order to learn to read and write. This raises the possibility that children gain much of their explicit knowledge about morphemes as a direct result of…

Comanche's mutation system, at first glance a relatively simple one, poses the following problems of analysis for both: (1) the variation in phonological substance manifested by the mutating segments themselves; and (2) the larger contextual pattern within which this mutation takes place. Comanche appears to exhibit a slightly skewed but typical…

Presents two analyses of deviant phonological systems. The one based on production evidence alone accounts for (1) differences in surface behavior of a set of phonetic segments with three possible phoneme sources, and (2) obstruent clusters across morpheme boundaries. The "substitution analysis" identifies the child's underlying representations…

Spanish American plural formation is discussed in relation to attempts that have been made to write a set of phonological rules that would correctly predict the Spanish plural using a combination of phonological rules and word structure constraints. A brief synopsis is resented of why previous attempts to predict the plural are in error.…