Tense repair and phonetics

What implications, if any, does the statement below have for the teaching of the verb tense system and verb tense repair?

“the more distant phonetically the past tense irregular form is from the non-past, the more likely it will be marked for tense” (p. 247).

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~mcboatwr/sp.html

I'm not entirely sure I get the drift of the statement. If he means that we are more likely to use past forms where they vary from the present, than ones that change less, or don't change, then I'm not sure I agree with it- it sounds a bit of a sweeping claim, though I may have missed his point.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tdol

I'm not entirely sure I get the drift of the statement. If he means that we are more likely to use past forms where they vary from the present, than ones that change less, or don't change, then I'm not sure I agree with it- it sounds a bit of a sweeping claim, though I may have missed his point.

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Apologies, I posted the wrong link to that.

This what he is saying:

final consonant replacement (make/made) are forms more likely to be unmarked for tense than internal vowel changes (sit/sat)

............

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~mcboatwr/sp.html

I was wondering about the link. As far as the study goes, it doesn't have many implications to me because, as the authors state, it remains to be seen whether the findings have a wider implication, outside the language of the study, and the other studies, all of which were pretty small scale.