Nativists like Pinker argue in 'The Language Instinct' that poverty-of-the-stimulus phenomena require pre-specified structural constraints unavailable in distributional input alone.

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Distributional input(what is available to learners from their environment alone): The raw information and examples we encounter through experience—in this case, the speech sounds and sentences a child hears in everyday conversation.
Nativists(as used in philosophy of mind): Philosophers and scientists who believe that many abilities and knowledge are inborn rather than learned from experience.
Poverty-of-the-stimulus(the phenomenon that nativists use to support their position): The observation that children learn language so quickly and completely even though the examples they hear are incomplete and messy—suggesting they must have some built-in knowledge helping them learn.
Pre-specified structural constraints(what nativists claim must exist to explain language learning): Built-in mental rules or patterns that are already set up in the brain before we experience the world, which help us organize and understand information.

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