  Taken together, these kinds of results raise the possibility that  some of the foundational learning mechanisms involved in language  acquisition are not language specific. If it turns out that babies  employ the sorts of distributional analysis studied by Saffran,  Redington and Chater, Pena, and Mintz not only in learning artificial languages, but also in learning natural languages, then that is  evidence against linguistic nativism. For this type of learning is  employed by humans and other animals in other contexts as well:  whatever is involved in language learning — be it innate or not — is not language-specific.