Memory research is part of cognitive psychology, so a memory is necessary for the acquisition of language and grammatical aspects. The investigation of a specific grammatical area like the past-tense acquisition offers the possibility of an "isolated" research to see how children learn and apply past tense. This point gives an insight into conclusions of memory functionality, so these areas complement one another to come to new views in research. This work is divided into four big sections: In

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... he first the basics of memory are explained. Furthermore a historical view is given and also different kinds of learning in studies are discussed. The second section is about different memory models to give an overview of common memory theories. In this chapter among other things Baddeley´s (1997) model of working memory is presented and also other points of views and hypotheses like the connectionist networks (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986). For a long time these hypotheses were focus of memory research and so a lot of studies were run to modify and develop new models of memory. The third section of this work explains the processes of child - learning: How and why is it possible that a child is able to learn new words and especially a language? This and other questions are discussed by using different hypothesis, which concern the early lexical development of children. Referring to the grammatical area children have to detect specific rules to apply them later in speech. But also memory failures like forgetting have to be mentioned to show how memory works. Finally in the last section of this work the past tense acquisition of children get analyzed. Regular and irregular verb forms have to be defined to find out if a rule to build past tense forms is essential or if it is more effective to list the verbs in memory through learning by heart. Models of past tense acquisition like the ACT-R - model by Anderson (1990) are explained but also alternative models such as the acquisition in connectionist networks get researched. [...]