Subcategories

Abstract This chapter introduces the idea of syntactic bootstrapping, a powerful word-learning strategy that children use to restrict their hypothesis space about a new word’s meaning based on knowledge of its syntactic category. Following the bulk of the work in this area, it focuses on the acquisition of verb meanings. A learner hearing their parents say, “Your sister zorked the apple,” for example, can infer that zork is more likely to mean something like ATE, TASTED, or THREW than it is to mean something like WAVE, STAND, or BREATHE. So while it might not give learners the precise meaning, it at least helps them home in on the right aspects of their environment. The history of syntactic bootstrapping is discussed, including its motivations, initial reception among theorists, and large basis of empirical support. The acquisition of mental-state verbs (e.g., think, know, hope) provides a particularly informative case study.