Toddler Arielle sees a baby being tickled by a boy and hears her mother say, "The boy is tickling the baby." Arielle has never heard anyone use the word "tickling." Arielle figures out that "tickling" is what the boy is doing to the baby, not what the baby is doing (laughing and waving her arms in delight), through

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Syntactic bootstrapping is the process by which young children use the grammatical structure of a sentence to help them figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word. In the example given, Arielle was able to understand that "tickling" was a verb being done by the boy because her mother used the sentence structure "The boy is tickling the baby." This allowed Arielle to make a connection between the word "tickling" and the action being performed by the boy, rather than the baby's response.

Toddler Arielle Sees a Baby Being Tickled by a Boy