Missing players: Phonology and the past-tense debate

The proposition that the mental lexicon is a 'dual route' system, advanced by Pinker and others to account for regular and irregular morphology, overlooks the important fact that morphological regularity correlates inversely with phonological regularity - 'regular' past-tense beeped being phonologically irregular (exceptional syllable), while 'irregular' past-tense kept is phonologically just regular. I argue that the correlation, which is general, can only be captured under a single - rather than 'dual' - architecture, and an associational - rather than rule based - theory of morphology. Where word-to-word associations are strong, morphology looks regular and phonological alternations are inhibited, making phonology look irregular. In a system in which regularities are attributed to 'rules', rules should be able to coexist with other rules, and morphological and phonological regularities should correlate directly, rather than inversely. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.