ABSTRACT
I came to developmental psychology rather late in life. In graduate school I never
read Piaget or had a course in development, and although I studied with Jerry
Bruner, that was before he became a developmentalist. Mostly I ran rats and con-
tinued to do so for a number of years after getting my degree. So when I became
disaffected with animal research and wanted to know about learning in a more hu-
man setting, I had a lot of catching up to do. That was about 30 years ago, but I can
still remember my first impressions of the developmental literature. Much of it re-
minded me of the animal discrimination literature that I was trying to escape. Hull
and Spence seemed to have an awful lot of influence on the field of children’s
learning and development. But, as I delved into the language learning literature, I
found really interesting work that came from another tradition entirely.
