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.
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