  We have explained the ways in which Chomsky’s work in linguistics inspired subsequent Nativist thinking in the cognitive sciences. But there is an irony here in that, except for the very general Poverty of the Stimulus schema (which can be traced back to Plato), linguistics and language acquisition have not served as easy-to-use templates or paradigms for developing Nativist hypotheses in other domains. We so far have no reason to think that there is any domain outside language that requires anything as complex as a grammar of a natural language to represent it. So linguistic competence remains an exceptional element in our cognitive  make-up.[16] And even though some of the distinctive features of language acquisition have counterparts in other domains—sensitive and critical periods in the development of visual perception, for example—there does seem to be something exceptional about the way virtually every normal child comes to master a language. We might say that for Nativists, language has been more an inspiration than a working model. But at the same time, as Nativists move beyond language, they may avoid many of the methodological challenges to the Chomskyan approach (including: is a grammar a theory of competence, in what sense are grammars ‘mentally represented’, is the pld all that’s relevant to acquisition, etc).