DOI 10.1515/applirev-2012-0010 Applied Linguistics Review 2012; 3(2): 211 – 232 Dwight Atkinson Cognitivism, adaptive intelligence, and second language acquisition Abstract: There is no doubt that the “cognitive revolution,” in tandem with a focus on second language teaching, gave birth to the organized study of second language acquisition (SLA). In this sense, SLA studies has always been a cog- nitive science, although calls have recently been made to reemphasize and strengthen the connection. This paper: 1) reviews the cognitivist vision of mind/ brain which has historically dominated both cognitive science and SLA studies; 2) describes how cognitive science has changed in recent years; and 3) introduces an alternative paradigm in cognitive science, adaptive intelligence, which may help us to better understand SLA. Keywords: cognitivism, adaptive intelligence, second language acquisition, sociocognitive, alignment Dwight Atkinson: Purdue University, USA. E-mail: dwightatki@gmail.com 1 Introduction Why do we have the cognition that we do, and what is its nature? The mainstream answer since the mid-20th century has been that human minds are machines pro- cessing narrow-bandwidth environmental input from which they build abstract, internal, rule-governed knowledge representations which allow them to solve logic-like problems. 1 In this view, the contribution of the non-cognitive environ- ment is small – the real action takes place once the processor is activated, and its products are a direct result of its internal logic problem-solving abilities. Follow- ing others (e.g. Haugeland 1998), I will call this view cognitivism. An alternative approach has arisen largely in opposition to cognitivism. In this view, cognition is a node in an ecological network comprising mind, body, 1 The obvious (if partial) exception here is Chomsky’s work, one of the main contributions to modern cognitivism. In this paper, however, I deal more with domain-general cognitivist theory. The synoptic accounts in this paper are based on many sources, only some of which can be listed here due to strict word limits. See Atkinson (2010, 2011a: note 2) for additional sources. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 (CS4) WDG (155×230mm) DGMetaScience J-2618 ALR 3:2 pp. 211–232 2618_3-2_02 (p. 211) PMU:(idp) 22/06/2012 10 July 2012 2:24 PM