Which scenario best illustrates syntactic bootstrapping?

Which scenario best illustrates syntactic bootstrapping?

• A. Using visual cues alone to guess word meaning.
• B. Learning word meanings by repeating caregiver's utterances.
• C. Using sentence structure to infer the meaning of new words; e.g., hearing "The bird is gobbing" suggests gobbing is a verb.
• D. Memorizing whole phrases without deriving underlying meaning.

Answer: (C)

Syntactic bootstrapping is about using the structure of a sentence to figure out what a new word means. When you hear a sentence like “The bird is gobbing,” the word gobbing sits in a verb-like frame with an auxiliary and an -ing form, signaling an action. From that syntactic cue, a learner infers that gobbing is describing an activity, so gobbing is a verb and roughly what kind of word it is, even without a direct definition. That’s why this scenario best illustrates bootstrapping: the meaning is inferred from how the word is used in the sentence, not from just visuals, mimicry of phrases, or memorized chunks. The other options don’t show using sentence structure to deduce meaning—one relies on visual cues alone, another on repetition without parsing grammar, and the last on memorized phrases without generalizing to new words or grammatical categories.

Syntactic bootstrapping is about using the structure of a sentence to figure out what a new word means. When you hear a sentence like “The bird is gobbing,” the word gobbing sits in a verb-like frame with an auxiliary and an -ing form, signaling an action. From that syntactic cue, a learner infers that gobbing is describing an activity, so gobbing is a verb and roughly what kind of word it is, even without a direct definition. That’s why this scenario best illustrates bootstrapping: the meaning is inferred from how the word is used in the sentence, not from just visuals, mimicry of phrases, or memorized chunks. The other options don’t show using sentence structure to deduce meaning—one relies on visual cues alone, another on repetition without parsing grammar, and the last on memorized phrases without generalizing to new words or grammatical categories.