Argues that discoveries concerning the essential properties of whole categories of word concepts are critical to essentialist intuitions. Reviews studies demonstrating that words and concepts are not used in accordance with essentialism, concluding that since essentialism is not vindicated by ordinary word use, it fails to undermine the cognitive…

In a response to Halliday (1993), Gee (1994) discussed the analogies between learning a language and learning in general. The article presents two of his proposals and discusses an empirical method for studying them. The article focuses on identifying the units acquired during language learning and the relevance of the concept of an innate…

The factors underlying memory performance in learning are shown to be affected by strategic processing and by automatic processing. Strategic processing is under the conscious control and effort of the learner while automatic processing is dependent on the strength of associations between new concepts and known concepts in a given domain.…

Although traditional learning theories are based on a demonstrative view of cognition, human beings tend to reason both demonstratively and dialectically. To examine the dialectical theory five studies were conducted. In the first study subjects rated words that could be used as personality descriptors for likability and subsequently learned them…