INTERFERENCE AND CONTEMPORARY PHONOLOGICAL THEORY

Whereas some rules of L1 never cause interference, others almost always do. This paper examines, in detail, the accounts that contemporary theories of phonology provide of this state of affairs and argues for the hypothesis that only a theory that not only clearly separates morphologically dependent alternations from morphologically independent ones, but also incorporates the former directly into morphology (contra Chomsky & Halle, 1968; Hooper, 1976, Kiparsky, 1982), is up to the task. A large and representative body of data, available from previous studies, is examined and analyzed to support that hypothesis. © 1991 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan