How else, the reasoning goes, could children, subject to the haphazard, fragmented, and freewheeling linguistic assault of daily life, possibly internalize a wealth of precise grammatical constructs and rules other than by possessing a formidable mental arsenal standing at the ready to process the verbal onslaught? And because any child can learn any language, the mental arsenal cannot be language-specific; the mind must be able to latch on to a universal core common to all languages.
