 L1/M1 refer to Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus argument: despite receiving little explicit linguistic and grammatical instruction, children develop language rapidly and at a young age, and quickly come to display competence applying complex grammatical rules. Similarly, Mikhail and other proponents of the analogy argue that children acquire moral knowledge at a young age based on relatively little explicit instruction. However, critics of the analogy point out several points of difference. First, children actually receive quite a bit of explicit moral instruction and correction, and in contrast with the linguistic case, this often takes the form of explicit statements of moral rules: ‘don’t hit,’ ‘share,’ and so on. Secondly, there is debate over the age at which children actually display moral competence. Paul Bloom (2013; see also Blake, McAuliffe, and Warneken 2014) has argued that babies display moral tendencies as early as 3–6 months, but others (most famously Kohlberg (1969) and Piaget (1970)) have argued that children are not fully competent with moral judgment until as late as 8–12 years, by which time they have received quite a bit of moral instruction, both implicit and explicit. A related point concerns the ability to receive instructions: in the case of language, a child requires some linguistic knowledge or understanding in order even to receive instruction: a child who has no understanding of language will not understand instructions given to her. But in the moral case, a child need not understand moral rules in order to be instructed in them, so there is less need to posit some innate knowledge or understanding. Nichols et al. (2016) have conducted a series of experiments using statistical learning and Bayesian modeling to show how children might learn complex rules with scant input (see also Nichols 2021). Finally, while children may initially acquire the moral values present in their environment, they sometimes change their values or develop their own values later in life in ways that present spontaneously and with little conscious effort. This is in marked contrast with language; as any second-language learner will recognize, acquiring a new language later in life is effortful and, even if one succeeds in achieving fluency, the first language is rarely lost. Lastly, as Prinz (2008) points out, children are punished for moral violations, which may explain why they are quicker to learn moral than grammatical rules.