While it seems plausible to argue that some of the basic rules for the allocation of French gender to nouns can be worked out implicitly through induction, this may be less plausible in the case of more complex features of language, such as the difference between eager to please and easy to please. The functioning of many grammatical structures is in fact not clearly and consistently demonstrated in language use, particularly to children. Further, in using language, we omit elements or use grammatical forms wrongly. How can children be expected to make the right generalizations?

This realization led the linguist, Noam Chomsky, to claim that the input to children was simply insufficient or, in his words too 'impoverished', to explain how children arrive at a full internal grammar of their language. He therefore hypothesized that children must come into the world with some kind of universal mental template which allows them to construct language, despite the limitations of the input. All children need from the input is information to enable them to select the required universal building blocks for their particular language. These hypothesized universal building blocks are referred to as Universal Grammar.

This is not to say that a language cannot be constructed of anything other than the universal building blocks; rather that such anomalous structures would be the exception in language. These would have to be learned by children through implicit induction, but the language acquisition process of the child would nevertheless be greatly simplified.

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