Recent studies of the acquisition of discriminative and productive speech capacities raise the possibility that certain aspects of human language are specifically innate. (1) In 1–3‐month olds, the relative amount of orientation to vowel‐vowel transitions suggest that /a/ is the most basic vowel, /u/ the next most basic, and /i/ the least basic. (2) In 1–2‐year olds, the notion of actor‐action‐object is present. There is no obvious explanation for the development of these universal features of adult language to be found either in the child's nonlinguistic behavior or in his experience.