Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan have supplied an innovative and intriguing juxtaposition of the supposed role played by phonological working memory (PWM) in clarifying individual and group differences amid early internationally adopted (IA) children, deaf children with cochlear implants, simultaneous and sequential bilinguals, children who are learning sign languages, and children with otitis media. This new comparison proposes that sufficient exposure to phonology before 12 months of age is key in the development of ameliorated PWM. Consequently, long-term linguistic advantages in vocabulary and learning of morphosyntax emerge, but not advantages in other areas of higher cognition. One significant implication of the review is that albeit many intriguing links exist between language development and PWM, indisputable conclusions evade the field as to the directionality of a causal relationship between phonological development, other linguistic development, and PWM. This commentary makes the somewhat disputable proposal (Gathercole, 2006, and commentaries) that the evidence proposed points to PWM being an epiphenomenon emerging out of individual divergencies in the robustness and richness of phonological representations themselves. The authors hinted various times at the tantalizing relationship between phonology and PWM, but they do not enunciate explicitly that PWM could be a superfluous construct. This paper also proposes some proposals as to how one might test this suggestion experimentally or in a corpus of child language.