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Throughout the years, philosophers and psychologists have striven to solve the mind-boggling question of learning by juxtaposing the two competing theories, namely, empiricism and rationalism. They have usually opted for one and ruled out the other on the grounds that it cannot account for learning because theoretical and empirical evidence discredits it. Since 1965, with the publication of Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in which, he explicitly introduces the notion of Universal Grammar and implicitly employs the term to support Fodor's philosophical view of learning in terms of 'language of thought', the rationalistic arguments seem to have taken over this never-ending and perpetual battle. Here in this article, it is argued that despite its popularity among a good number of scholars, the rationalistic account of learning suffers from serious flaws. A conglomerate of empirical and theoretical evidence challenges the notion of 'language of thought'. Self-interpretive power of the language of thought, inaccessibility of cognitive theories to truth conditional meaning, meaningful experiences, inability to test memory, problems with modularity and regulation are simply some of the arguments that might be raised against the idea of 'language of thought'. Finally, a framework for the acquisition of language is presented.

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The present study investigates the effect of different exposure densities on third grade Iranian junior high school (IJHS) students’ EFL development and retention. It also attempts to explore whether there is any differential performance due to type of post-exposure assessment tasks (recognition vs. written production). Performances of five groups of learners receiving equal amount of exposure to EFL knowledge with different densities over different time spans were compared on both recognition and written production tasks. The results of the repeated measures analysis of variance and paired sample tests reveal that there seems to be a threshold exposure density for development of structure production, as well as for the retention of total EFL and vocabulary production. Analyses of variance for the five groups were performed on the raw scores obtained for a pre-test and two post-tests. The results further reveal significant differences for acquisition and retention of the target EFL knowledge among different groups. The results also suggest different optimal exposure densities for the target EFL knowledge development and retention.