Discusses prevailing ideas of how children learn language and addresses the argument of rules versus analogies in learning to form the past tense of verbs. Cites cases involving connectionist models. (ML)

Focuses on a single rule of grammar to produce evidence of a memory system for language acquisition and processing that is modular; independent of real-world meaning; unaffected by frequency and similarity; sensitive to formal distinctions; more sophisticated than the explicitly-taught rules it subsumes; developed independently of ambient input;…