Rethinking innateness is a timely volume which forcefully demonstrates the importance of modelling in understanding development, ‘innateness’, and the nature of change. It provides an inspiring vision of what developmental psychology could one day be like, linking behaviour and biology via connectionist models. However, Rispoli's worry about the book's potential for detrimental polarization does not seem unfounded. One aspect of the book that deserves comment in this respect is the focus on connectionism to the exclusion of other types of model. It is unclear from Rethinking innateness itself whether this exclusion of other approaches merely stems from the legitimate desire to write a focused book, or whether it possibly reflects an actively held view that connectionism is the one true approach to modelling development. Regardless of the authors' intentions, the role of connectionism in relation to other computational approaches is an issue which is particularly pertinent to the study of language acquisition.

To clarify straightaway, I not only concur with Elman et al. on the central role of modelling, but also strongly believe that the task of the cognitive scientist is not complete until one has an account of how a particular process is realised in a neural architecture. These two commitments give connectionist models a central role. But they do not make connectionism the exclusive modelling tool for the study of language acquisition, nor necessarily the best path to currently pursue. The reasons for this are twofold.

The first is a matter of research strategy. It is possible that more rapid progress and greater success might be made if one starts with high-level models which give less immediate regard to matters of implementation.