Syntactic bootstrapping

Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory in linguistics which proposes that children learn word meanings by recognizing the syntactic categories (such as nouns, adjectives, etc.) and structure of their language. Children have innate knowledge of the links between syntactic and semantic categories and can use their observations about syntax to make inferences about word meaning. Learning words in one's native language can be challenging because the extralinguistic context of use does not give specific enough information about word meanings. This problem can be overcome by using information present in a word's syntactic category. Once conclusions are made about a word's syntactic category, a child can then infer aspects of the word's meaning.

The first appearance of empirical evidence of syntactic bootstrapping comes from 1957 research done by Roger Brown. In his research, Brown demonstrated that preschool-aged children could use their knowledge of different parts of speech to distinguish the meaning of nonsense words in English. The results of Brown’s experiment provided the first evidence showing that children could use syntax to infer meaning for newly encountered words.

Roger Brown began the topic of syntactic bootstrapping unknowingly. In 1990, Lila Gleitman coined the term “syntactic bootstrapping.” This term was modified from Steven Pinker's first usage of the term "bootstrapping" in reference to semantic bootstrapping. According to Gleitman's hypothesis, verbs are learned with a delay compared to other parts of speech because the linguistic information that supports their acquisition is not available during the early stages of language acquisition. The acquisition of verb meaning in children is pivotal to their language development. Syntactic bootstrapping seeks to explain how children acquire these words.

The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis is based on the idea that there are universal/innate links between syntactic categories and semantic categories. Learners can therefore use their observations about the syntactic categories of novel words to make inferences about their meanings. This hypothesis is intended to solve the problem that the extralinguistic context of use is uninformative by itself about a novel word's meaning.

When children are presented with a sentence that includes an unfamiliar verb, they need to make the correct associations between a new word and what it refers to. They might look to extralinguistic context clues to help them determine what the meaning of that verb is, but the environment does not give specific enough evidence to determine that meaning. While some researchers thought that cross-situational learning could help children to learn words, Gillette et al. (1999) have shown that this kind of learning procedure is especially difficult for verbs. Rather, they proposed that children use syntactic information, such as the position of words within sentences, to help them learn word meanings.

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