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Introduction: concepts of development, learning, and acquisition

‘Learning’, in a very broad sense of cognitive psychology, is defined as ‘‘a relatively permanent change in an organism’s potential for responding that results from prior experience or practice’’ (Gordon 1989: 6). This special issue will deal with learning in a more narrow sense, with learning in human beings and, more specifically, with language learning. Due to its association with early behaviorism, ‘language learning’ has long been a frowned upon notion. It was substituted with the term ‘language acquisition’ by researchers with a generativist agenda. In opposition to the empiricist tradition, they established new notions along with a new linguistic paradigm — generative grammar. ‘Learning’ has not only been largely banned from the linguistic literature but it has also received less attention in cognitive psychology, due to the ‘‘cognitive revolution’’ (Baars 1986) instigated by Chomsky (1957, 1959). One of the consequences of this paradigmatic turn was that new information processing models emphasized knowledge representation and de-emphasized the learning process (Glaser 1990; Reber 1993: 4). In this special issue, we take a fresh look at the old controversy in the light of novel and challenging approaches which have arrived recently in the field — implicit modes of learning, bootstrapping, optimality theory, connectionism, usage-based and emergentist approaches, self-organizing and dynamic systems. In this introductory paper we will set the scene for the articles to come: In Section 1 we will start out with a clarification of basic terms like development, learning, and acquisition. 2 In Section 2 we will briefly recapitulate the various stages in the debate between rationalists and empiricists up to now. In Sections 3 and 4 more recent approaches will be characterized before, in Section 5, the outline of the special issue including the individual papers will be summarized.