ABSTRACT
My research career started over 35 years ago with a primary focus on discrimination learning in preschool children. The stage had been set by the research of Birge (1941) and Kuenne (1946). The theoretical framework was provided by Dollard and Miller (1950), who had elaborated on the role language might play to facilitate discrimination learning and particularly transfer. A considerable amount of research over the next decade investigated the role of language in learning and transfer. Although that research did not result in the outright rejection of Dollard and Miller's acquired distinctiveness hypothesis, the end result was a shift of focus to attention as the critical variable in children's learning. Difficulty was attributed to task or performance variables that tended either to distract the subjects attention or to usurp channel capacity.
