  These two approaches to language acquisition clearly differ  significantly in their conception of the nature of the learning  process and the learner's role in it, but we are not concerned to  evaluate their respective merits here. Rather, the important point  for our purposes is that they both attribute substantial amounts of  innate information about language to the language learner.  In what follows, we will look in more detail at the various arguments that have been used to support this ‘nativist’ theory of  language acquisition. We will focus on the following question: