[6] “Cognitive theories of learning focus on the mind, and attempt to model how information is received, assimilated, stored, and recalled……Cognitivists argue that while things like the environment are important inputs to learning, learning is more than simply the collection of inputs and the production of outputs. The mind has the ability to synthesize analyze, formulate, and extract received information and stimuli in order to produce things that cannot be directly attributed to the inputs given.”

(Retrieved December 27, 2000, from the World Wide Web: http://www.pittarese.com/lt/cognitivism.htm)

“The cognitive revolution became evident in American psychology during the 1950’s….One of the major players in the development of cognitivism is Jean Piaget, who developed the major aspects of his theory as early as the 1920’s. Piaget’s ideas did not impact North America until the 1960’s after Miller and Bruner founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies.”

 (Retrieved December 27, 2000, from the World Wide Web: http://usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/mergel/brenda.htm)

“To find the principles common to all languages that enable people to speak creatively and freely is Noam Chomsky's description of his goal as a linguist. Many recent works have stressed that all children go through the same stages of language development regardless of the language they are learning. In examining this, Chomsky gave linguistics, the study of the human speech, a new direction. Knowing a language means being able to produce an infinite number of sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. Chomsky refers to this ability as the "creative aspect" of language. His first book, Syntactic Structures, published in 1957, outlines his system of transformational grammar. This grammar consists of surface structures - the sounds and words in a sentence - and deep structures that contain the meaning of the sentence. The meaning is converted by a transformation - any of an ordered set of rules - to a surface structure. Chomsky says that children are born with a knowledge of the principles of the grammatical structure of all languages, and this inborn knowledge explains the success and speed with which they learn language.”

(Retrieved December 27, 2000, from the World Wide Web: http://www.viavale.com.br/english/sk-chom.html)