  Tomasello argues that by adopting a more ‘user-friendly’  conception of natural language grammars and by radically expanding  one's conception of the language-relevant information available to  children learning language, the ‘gap’ exploited by the  argument from the poverty of the stimulus — that is, the gap  between what we know about language and the data we learn it from  — in large part disappears. This gives rise to a third  important respect in which Tomasello's theory differs from that of  the linguistic nativist. On his view, children learn language without the aid of any inborn linguistic information: what children bring to  the language learning task — their innate endowment — is  not language-specific. Instead, it consists of ‘mind  reading,’ together with perceptual and cognitive skills that  are employed in other domains as well as language learning. These  skills include: (i) the ability to share attention with others; (ii)  the ability to discern others' intentions (including their  communicative intentions); (iii) the perceptual ability to segment  the speech stream into identifiable units at different levels of  abstraction; and (iv) general reasoning skills, such as the ability  to recognize patterns of various sorts in the world, the ability to  make analogies between patterns that are similar in certain respects, and the ability to perform certain sorts of statistical analysis of  these patterns. Thus, Tomasello's theory contrasts strongly with the  nativist approach.