The similitude among language acquisition stages across diverse people and languages shows that children come from birth with some special abilities about what generalizations to look for and what to ignore and, also, how to discover the regularities of their native language. Learning a language, as well as learning to walk, is quite different than learning to read or to ride a bicycle. The main difference may be that the first two processes are based on acquisition, while the latter are sustained by learning to do something. The theories discussed in this article are the innateness theory and its alternatives – the empiricist alternative and the theory formation. Both come with new arguments against the innateness theory and, thus, they may easily be considered as rather opposite than alternative ones.
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