Syntactic bootstrapping

Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory that proposes that verbs, presented in their syntactic frames, provide a source of information about their meaning. When children are presented with a sentence that includes an unfamiliar verb, they look to extralinguistic context clues to help them in determining what the definition of that verb is. According to Gleitman’s definition of syntactic bootstrapping coined in 1990, verbs are learned with a delay because the linguistic information that supports their acquisition is not available during the early stages of language acquisition. This would seem to show the importance of early acquisition of verb meaning in children is pivotal to language development.