“My own view is that we need to create precise computational models of the language acquisition process – sentences in, grammar out – and see if they succeed in mastering the structure of any language whose sentences are fed into it, in a way that resembles the way children do it. Then whatever is in that model is the best theory of the child’s innate learning abilities. Every now and again someone will try to do that (I did in my first book, Language Learnability and Language Development, in 1984.)”