Semantic Bootstrapping

Semantic bootstrapping is a linguistic theory of child language acquisition proposing that children acquire the syntax of a language by first learning and recognizing semantic elements and then building, or bootstrapping, upward from that knowledge. Under the theory, children learning words come to recognize that those words label conceptual categories such as objects or actions, and they then use these semantic categories as a cue to the corresponding syntactic categories, such as nouns and verbs. Having tentatively assigned a word to a syntactic category, the child looks for other correlated properties of that category, which helps reveal how nouns and verbs are marked and ordered in their particular language; similarly, perceived conceptual relations such as the agent of an event help the child identify grammatical relations such as the subject of a sentence. The theory rests on two assumptions: that children can perceive the meaning of words and sentences by some means, and that there is a strong correspondence between semantic categories and syntactic categories, a correspondence the child uses to iteratively build, test and refine internal grammar rules as more of the language is encountered.