You are not talking nonsense at all! In fact, I'd say you've hit the nail on the head.
The innate argument comes from the idea that children use very specific linguistic structures that are rule-bound and that they learn these rules naturally with no explicit teaching (in typical development). At the time that Chomsky first published, a more behavioural account of language was common. Chomsky wrote a critique of Skinner (the verbal behaviour man) which was scathing about the idea that children hear explicit teaching of language structures. This is often called the "poverty of the stimulus" argument. Innatists are very clear in their minds that people who have an adequate language processing system or "underlying grammar" will pick up language as long as they have access to any sort of input at all, that language is "acquired" and not learned. Stephen Pinker writes a lot of popular science books about this e.g. The Language Instinct.
Of course, we know that some people don't e.g. children with language disorders for whatever reason, but often their difficulties represent very precise violations of the rules e.g. inverting question types e.g. instead of saying "why are you going to the shop?" saying "why you are going to the shop?" etc. The types of errors are seen as further evidence of this underlying grammar, with perhaps some "faulty wiring". Innatists point to genetic causes for this as proof that it is about our brain structure, not about learning (as though these were mutually exclusive!)
Unfortunately, more people read Chomsky's critique of Skinner than read Skinner's work which is really quite dense to read, so they got a very one sided view of things which amounted to the baby being thrown out with the bathwater. Yet if you take a purely behavioural approach it's sometimes easy to see why Chomsky scoffed at the idea that you could teach every possible situation that a child would encounter with reference to language and why his views held so much sway.
To give you an example, I remember as an undergrad working with a child of 7 on an ABA programme. His conversational programme consisted of a number of different things:
- brainstorm five things about a topic (e.g. the Simpsons) and then use these in a conversation
- say "uh huh" or "oh really?" when someone completed a statement e.g. "I'm going to town on Saturday." "Uh huh"
- observe a person's clothing to make a judgement about what to speak to them about e.g. initiate a conversation on the Simpsons with someone wearing a Simpson's top
This followed traditional ABA conversation work which is structured on an understanding of how conversations work behaviourally: statement-statement, statement-question, statement-question-statement etc. I could see where these targets had come from but I could also see that in a very real sense they often didn't work. I remember one example clearly. The little lad had been in class, making an easter picture (he was in Year 1 at the time having been held back a year in nursery). One of the children next to him said: "I'm sticking clouds on mine" (statement) and the boy I was working with said "I'm sticking clouds on mine too. Are you going to draw a rabbit?" (question-statement). Bingo, token material, totally hit the mark in terms of our programming. However, what happened next was that the child who had first spoken responded: "clouds are like cotton wool, cotton cotton cotton wool, like candy floss it makes me full!". A child across the table went "cotton schmotton" and another one completed "it's so rotten" and then they literally descended into speaking gibberish e.g. spaghettitititititititi is spagettitittiti!". The kids just bounced off eachother verbally but were increasingly giggly and making eyes at eachother and having fun. The child I was working with just stood there, obviously confused and eventually started to repeat: "I'm sticking clouds on mine too. Are you going to make a rabbit?" appearing distressed.
What happened between those kids was partially linguistic but was much more about joint engagement and that desire to make fun together which was just inaccessible to the boy I was working with. It is fairly likely that these typical had never encountered this exact set of circumstances before yet together they created a very particular dynamic despite not having been in that situation. The student I was working with just didn't know where to start with it, despite having much better language skills than any of those children at that table and having had explicit instruction in "conversational rules". Of course it could be (and subsequently was) behaviourally analysed in terms of teaching him to respond to rhymes in play etc and I can remember that I went off to university to research the development of conversational structure to feed back to the team. I found out about how kids mock eachother and play word games e.g. my daddy's car is bigger than yours, oh well, MY daddy's got a TRUCK that could SMASH your daddy's car... but of course, it's not that simple to create opportunities for those sorts of things even though they are so common etc and even then, they just don't follow a neat structure that reinforces particular contributions etc
As it's not easy for anyone to work out what's essential in terms of social skills, professionals from all backgrounds tend to apply an adult model to "what's needed" e.g. "uh huh" or "oh really?" as conversation maintenance targets, or idioms. I mean, idioms? Really? This is not an essential skill for a child who can't access an ongoing peer interaction, and it would be easier to teach them how to ask if they encounter words or phrases they don't know anyway. And find me an 8 year old who uses social politeness markers like "oh really?" when talking to their friends without adults present and I will be surprised!
The reality is there is much going on that we just don't fully understand and probably a lot of it is innate and no, it is probable that you will never be able to operationalise every single behaviour that makes it easy for us to understand and use language and participate actively in ongoing interaction. However, we really need to try to work hard to find the crucial skills that make things work and the only tool we have to work on these skills at present requires behavioural observation .
All of us need to work together. No one knows enough to get up on a high horse and declare they have The Answer at this point in time, because even though ABA has amazing data, it's not 100% perfect either. It can suffer from still wanting to view everything as observable and the mind as a "black box" that we can't even guess about even though we have lots of data that it's not, just as much as SLTs and others suffer from thinking that we can't view the "mysteries" of cognition in behavioural terms.
Moondog shared something with me about the need to look beyond the individual to the community which I think is pertinent. If typical kids all do something specific e.g. track eye gaze or use gesture in a specific way etc, then it's probable that this has a function that we may not understand but is
important to the process of learning and developing. A behavioural person might say: "oh we don't need to do that because it has no function" but actually do we know enough to ignore typical development? It may have a function we just can't work out as it's laying a foundation for a more complex behaviours. On the other side of the coin, SLTs need to know how social skills develop vs just having some sort of random theory about how it all works. There are people like Bonnie Brinton and Lesley Olswang who do work in this area but there is so much more to do.