Learning past tense morphology with specific language impairment: a case study

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a child with specific language impairment who usually omitted the regular past inflection in obligatory contexts yet occasionally over-regularized the past (e.g. *blowed). A treatment approach was employed that permitted a test of one current account of this paradoxical pattern, the filled paradigm' hypothesis. The child's gains over the treatment period did not conform to the predic tions of the hypothesis, but rather suggested the possibility that her use of the past tense inflection was related to the phonological properties of the verb stem.