Empiricists maintain that children learn the syntax of their language by using only general learning capacities. Nativists, on the other hand, claim that the acquisition of certain syntactic skills requires additional capacities. They therefore attribute to children an innate syntactic device. In this paper, arguments will be presented which suggest that nativists are mistaken. If all the effects of the semantic experiences which children undergo are taken into account, then the acquisition of syntax can be explained by attributing only general learning capacities to children. Moreover, these arguments also suggest that empiricist theories are more adequate than so-called semanticist theories, since the latter fail to consider one of the most important effects of the semantic experiences.
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