Language acquisition research is divided by two different theoretical approaches: nativist vs. usage-based approaches. Nativist theories make strong assumptions about innate, modular linguistic structure. Usage-based accounts, by contrast, only assume general cognitive abilities, most of which are not even specific to humans. In usage-based approaches only the specific combination of these abilities makes humans different froom other species and enables language and language learning. Even though there is still a big divide between the two approaches both habe to explain how children extract their knowledge from their linguistic and cultural contexts. Differences and commonalities in the answer to this question shall be discussed by proponents of the two approaches.
Organistion: Sabine Stoll, Miriam Dittmar, Aurélia Robert-Tissot