Syntactic Bootstrapping

Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory in developmental psycholinguistics proposing that children acquire word meanings by identifying syntactic categories and structure within the language they hear. The theory holds that children possess an innate sensitivity to the connections between syntactic and semantic categories, which lets them draw inferences about a word's meaning from the grammatical position it occupies. Because the extralinguistic context surrounding a word's use often does not supply enough information to pin down its meaning on its own, children combine what they observe in context with syntactic analysis of the sentence, a combination that helps them acquire both lexical categories such as verbs and nouns and functional categories such as determiners and case markers.