  By the 1980's, a less intellectualized conception of how language is  acquired began to supplant the hypothesis-testing model. Whereas the  early model saw the child as a ‘little scientist,’  actively (if unconsciously) figuring out the rules of grammar, the  new ‘parameter-setting’ model conceived language  acquisition as a kind of growth or maturation; language acquisition  is something that happens to you, not something you do. The innate UG was no longer viewed as a set of tools for inference; rather, it was  conceived as a highly articulated set of representations of actual grammatical principles. Of course, since not everyone ends  up speaking the same language, these innate representations must  allow for some variation. This is achieved in this model via the notion of a ‘parameter’: some of the innately  represented grammatical principles contain variables that may take  one of a certain (highly restricted) range of values. These different ‘parameter settings’ are determined by the child's  linguistic experience, and result in the acquisition of different  languages. Thus, Chomsky (1988:61-62) compared the learner to a  switchbox: just as a switchbox's circuitry is all in place but for  some switches that need to be flicked to one position or another, the learner's knowledge of language is basically all in place, but for  some linguistic ‘switches’ that are set by linguistic  experience.