In psycholinguistics, bootstrapping refers to the question of how language acquisition "gets started." A child gradually acquires a great deal of interlocking knowledge about the structure and vocabulary of his or her language. It has sometimes been proposed that some specific type of linguistic knowledge can be acquired early, and that this enables the child to analyze words or sentences well enough to acquire further knowledge from them. Metaphorically, this early knowledge would serve as bootstraps by which the child pulls himself or herself up.
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Syntactic bootstrapping proposes that syntax comes that children use syntactic knowledge they have developed to help learn what words mean. That is, semantics builds on top of syntax. This idea was first tested experimentally by Lila Gleitman (1991).
Semantic bootstrapping in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that children utilize innately-known conceptual knowledge to create grammatical categories when acquiring their first language. Thus, for example, categories like "type of object/person" maps directly onto the linguistic category "noun", category like "action" onto "verb", etc.
It is proposed that this will get children started on their way to acquiring parts of speech, which later can be supplemented by other linguistic information. The hypothesis has received some support from the experiments that showed that three- to five-year-olds do, in fact, generally use nouns for things and verbs for actions more often than adults do. However, it has also been proposed that children may learn word meaning by attending to the distributional patterns of words in their language (see the distributional hypothesis), which does not require the category-word relation to be innately available.
Other theories such as cognitive linguistics also hold that the semantic mappings lead to syntactic discovery, but claims that these are also learned, and that the grammar also has semantics.[1]
Iterated learning and grounding: from holistic to compositional languages written by Paul Vogt. (See also an abstract of Project: Transmitting knowledge through the bootstrapping of compositional language.)