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. The relationship between semantic and syntactic categories can then be used to iteratively create, test, and refine internal grammar rules until the child's understanding aligns with the language to which they are exposed, allowing for better categorization methods to be deduced as the child obtains more knowledge of the language.
Logic The semantic bootstrapping theory was first proposed by Steven Pinker in 1982 as a possible explanation of how a child can formulate grammar rules when acquiring a first language. Pinker's theory was inspired by two other proposed solutions to the bootstrapping problem. In 1981, Grimshaw claimed that there are correspondences between syntactic and semantic categories and in 1982, Macnamara postulated that certain semantic elements could serve as an inductive basis for syntactic elements, like parts of speech. Pinker's theory takes these ideas one step further by claiming that children inherently categorize words based upon their semantic properties and have an innate ability to infer syntactic categories from these semantic categories. A child acquiring a first language possesses, at all stages, an expectation that words will fall into specific grammatical categories. The child does not possess, however, an innate knowledge of how syntactic categories are expressed in the language they are acquiring. When children observe that a word is used to reference a semantic category, they can use their knowledge of the relations between semantic and syntactic categories to infer that this word belongs to a particular syntactic category. As children associate more words with syntactic categories, they can begin tracking other properties that can help them identify these syntactic categories in the absence of semantic evidence. Furthermore, identifying conceptual relations can help them to identify grammatical relations in a similar way. By identifying the semantic categories of words and phrases, children will know the corresponding syntactic categories of these elements and ultimately bootstrap their way to possessing a full understanding of the language’s grammar and formal expression.
Evidence Rondal and Cession tested the viability of the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis by observing the speech of 18 monolingual English speaking mothers to their normally developing children age 1 to 2 years old. In this experiment, investigators tape-recorded two half-hour sessions of mother-child verbal interactions. Child-directed utterances were extracted and coded for the 16 dependent variables below. These included the semantic categories, grammatical function categories, and part of speech categories. The semantic bootstrapping hypothesis states that a child uses semantic categories to infer grammatical categories. For example, action words (Dependent variable) indicate a verb (Categories), and the names of things (Dependent variable) indicate a noun (Categories). The focus of the experiment was to find out whether the grammatical and semantic categories and relations were correlated in the speech children heard. If they were, then that would indicate the plausibility of the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis.
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