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This introductory chapter provides an overall introduction to the issue of unconscious cognitive functions. It reviews the literature on a host of topics that are intimately related to the core issue including a short history of work on learning, a discussion of nativism and its relations to empiricism, an overview of the notion of consciousness, how to study it and its mental contents, and the links between these topics and basic principles of evolutionary biology.

On e of the main theories of this book is that perception and conception differ in content, representational format, and methods of processing. This chapter focuses on the differences in representation. It shows that perceptual and conceptual knowledge differ in important ways, and that it is necessary to distinguish them to understand how the mind develops. However, the interrelations between the two are many and intricate and still only partially understood.

This chapter begins by arguing that implicit learning is not an unconscious process, and that learning is about storing instances in a superpositional memory system. It argues that earlier methods of assessing implicit learning are flawed in that they are subject to either sensitivity problems or contamination. The chapter suggests that it is more profitable to consider a different way in which implicit learning might differ from explicit learning; namely, in terms of its information-processing characteristics. It reports two experiments examining some of these characteristics. The first focuses on the question of whether people learn abstract rules or fragments in artificial grammar learning. The second asks whether there are limitations in the sorts of regularities that an implicit-learning system can learn.

This chapter returns to the question of ‘how implicit is implicit learning?’ It asks whether, having read the preceding chapters, people still think there are sufficient grounds for distinguishing between implicit and explicit learning, and, if so, what are these grounds? The chapter also looks at directions that future research in this area might take. It suggests that the future challenge is to understand how symbolic processing emerges out of first-order systems such as connectionist networks.

In order to bridge the gap between theory and practice and provide a model for practicing language teachers, this chapter addresses the most relevant aspects of vocabulary teaching by reviewing the findings of classic and state-of-the-art research studies presented in the previous chapters. This is followed by how these findings can be adapted and applied in the classroom. The chapter concludes with ten commandments for twenty-first-century vocabulary teaching that can help L2 learners in successful long-term vocabulary development. The commandments include suggestions about creating favorable learning conditions for both explicit and implicit vocabulary learning, extending students’ depth of vocabulary knowledge, and lexical fluency with the help of using mobile learning technologies.

This chapter, which examines the concepts of implicit and deliberate control and their implications for awareness, shows that the effect considered, being associated with strategic control, is more accurately described by implicit control. This suggests that deliberate control needs to be applied as an explanation after implicit control loses its ability to accurately describe the given data. Implicit control describes those forms of learning or memory to which the learner has no access; implicit learning is compared with the explicit form whereby control assures the learner that he or she controls individual actions. Most of the actions and tasks are governed by both implicit and deliberate control, the only difference being the awareness of actions in deliberate control and inaccessible actions in implicit control.