Nativist hypothesizes suffer from a lack of imagination in looking for alternative explanations. I cannot explain it? Must be innate! Or, children do it? Must be innate!
Cognitive research points to a much more promising explanation: we are really good at learning, and we can learn abstract concepts pretty quickly, even as very young children. See Stanislas Dehaene's work for instance.
Abstracting concepts for big and small from our environment and associating sounds with it is much more plausible than passing around information about abstract concepts in genes through natural selection based on random genetic mutations.