For over 35 years, beliefs about the learnability of natural language have acted as roadblocks in the way of further development in linguistics. Rigorous and useful formal work has led to the unwarranted adoption of extreme positions which in turn have tended to stifle collaboration and polarize debate. In his article, MacWhinney suggests a way around such roadblocks – or rather many ways around. He demonstrates that we should look for multiple mechanisms to help understand how it is that children learn language from the evidence to which they are exposed.