A view of first language acquisition advocated by Elizabeth Bates, Michael Tomasello and others which stands in direct opposition to nativism.

This view holds that when children acquire a language, what they are actually doing is acquiring construction s: linguistic units of varying sizes and increasing degrees of abstractness. As the complexity and abstractness of the units increases, linguistic creativity begins to emerge. According to this view, the creativity exhibited by young children in their early language happens because they are constructing utterances out of already mastered constructions in ways that facilitate expression of a situated communicative intention.

Thus from this perspective the process of language acquisition is ‘emergent’, involving a huge amount of learning, rather than due to an innate pre-specification for language, a ‘universal grammar’.