  A recent book by Michael Tomasello (Tomasello 2003) addresses the  nativist's demand for an alternative theory directly. Tomasello  argues that language learners acquire knowledge of syntax by using  inductive, analogical and statistical learning methods, and by  examining a broader range of data for the purposes of confirmation  and disconfirmation. He argues that children formulate abstract  syntactic generalizations rather late in the learning process (around the age of 4 or 5) and that their earliest utterances are governed by much less general rules of thumb, or ‘constructions.’  More abstract constructions, framed in increasingly adult-like and  ‘syntactic’ terms, are progressively formulated through  the application of pattern-recognition skills (‘analogy’) and a kind of statistical analysis of both incoming data and  previously acquired constructions, which Tomasello calls  ‘functional distributional   analysis.’[7] 