ABSTRACT
Where does grammar come from? How does it develop in children? Developmental psycholinguists who set out to answer these questions quickly find themselves impaled on the horns of a dilemma, caught up in a modern variant of the ancient war between empiricists and nativists. Indeed, some of the fiercest battles in this war have been waged in the field of child language. Many reasonable individuals in this field have argued for a middle ground, but such a compromise has proven elusive thus far, in part because the middle ground is difficult to define.
