Semantic bootstrapping

Semantic bootstrapping is a linguistic theory of child language acquisition which proposes that children can acquire the syntax of a language by first learning and recognizing semantic elements and building upon, or bootstrapping from, that knowledge. This theory proposes that children, when acquiring words, will recognize that words label conceptual categories, such as objects or actions. Children will then use these semantic categories as a cue to the syntactic categories, such as nouns and verbs. Having identified particular words as belonging to a syntactic category, they will then look for other correlated properties of those categories, which will allow them to identify how nouns and verbs are expressed in their language. Additionally, children will use perceived conceptual relations, such as Agent of an event, to identify grammatical relations, such as Subject of a sentence. This knowledge, in turn, allows the learner to look for other correlated properties of those grammatical relations.

This theory requires two critical assumptions to be true. First, it requires that children are able to perceive the meaning of words and sentences. It does not require that they do so by any particular method, but the child seeking to learn the language must somehow come to associate words with objects and actions in the world. Second, children must know that there is a strong correspondence between semantic categories and syntactic categories.