Truscott and Sharwood-Smith's (henceforth T&SS's) paper offers an interesting set of hypotheses about one possible processing perspective in research on language acquisition. What is striking about this exposition of their model is that it ignores almost entirely the context of previous research on this issue. Embedding their exposition in its historical context would have in no way diminished the innovation entailed in their proposal. Instead it could have served as an instrument for ensuring conceptual parsimony, which in my view is flawed in this exposition.