Presents the goals of the Plunkett and Marchman (PM) connectionist model of the acquisition of verb morphology, and responds to related criticisms. Claims that small vocabulary size allows young children to correctly produce both regular and irregular past tense forms, and that non-linearities in vocabulary growth are a contributing factor to the…

If the basic operations hypothesis (EJ 184 227) is interpreted as a general principle governing acquisition of all movement rules, it may obscure the fact that children distinguish between unbounded and local rules. Error patterns support this distinction, lending credence to theories with separate status for the two rule types. (Author/RD)

Goodluck and Solan (EJ 205 641) presented alternative formulations about why errors predicted by basic operations fail to occur and suggested a refined hypothesis. Each aspect of their argument is addressed, and it is concluded that descriptive power, methodology and principles for restricting error predictions favor our original analysis. (RD)