Bootstrapping (linguistics): Difference between revisions

Bootstrapping is a term used in language acquisition and the field of linguistics. It refers to the idea that infants and children are innately equipped with mental processes that aid in language learning.^[1] The language acquisition bootstrapping processes can be divided into smaller mechanisms, including semantic bootstrapping, syntactic bootstrapping, prosodic bootstrapping, and pragmatic bootstrapping.

In literal terms, a bootstrap is the small strap on a boot that is used to help pull on the entire boot. Similarly in computer science, booting refers to the startup of an operation system by means of first initiating a smaller program. Therefore, bootstrapping is a general term used to refer to the leveraging of a small action into a more powerful and significant operation.

Bootstrapping was a term first introduced by Steven Pinker as a metaphor for the idea that children are innately equipped with mental processes that help initiate language acquisition. Bootstrapping attempts to identify the language learning processes that enable children to learn about the structure of their native language.^[2] In more simpler terms, bootstrapping serves as a shortcut of using prior knowledge of language to help learn about a new aspect of language.

Although bootstrapping was not researched until the 1990's, earlier studies in a different area of psychology provide evidence for the phenomenon. Bootstrapping can be thought of as having its origins in connectionism. This theory centers around a general principle that human cognition is a series of simple, interconnected networks. In simplified terms, connectionism idealizes human cognition as being similar to how computers function. In terms of learning, humans have basic statistical learning capabilities that allows them to problem solve.^[3] These basic functions provide us with mechanisms for higher level learning, as we can use the basic information in order to create a database which allows us to learn more advanced material.

When comparing language learning to computational functioning, initially a child must learn how to parse out segments in a seemingly unparsable stream of speech. Statistical learning has been seen in studies where children are able to determine word boundaries when exposed to streams of nonsense speech.^[4] In every language, there are certain sounds that are more likely to occur in conjunction with each other, such as the consonant cluster [st] in "stop," and those that are not as likely, such as a combination of [g+b] in English. It appears that children are able to learn the statistical probability of certain sounds occurring in conjunction with one another, and thus are able to parse out word boundaries.

Utilizing these statisitical abilities, children appear to be able to form mental representations, or neural networks, of relevant pieces of information.^[5] Pieces of relevant information include word classes, which in connectionist theory, are seen as each having an internal representation and various transitional links between various concepts.^[6] Neighbouring words thus provide the concepts and links for children to engage in bootstrapping by using their previous knowledge to create new representations.

Semantic bootstrapping was first introduced by Steven Pinker in attempts to explain how children discover the relationship between meaning and syntax.^[7] Semantic bootstrapping aims to illustrate how children use meaning to determine the particular grammar structures of their native language.

Pinker made several assumptions about how the process of a child's language acquisition:^[7]

1. Children must learn the meaning of nouns before understanding or producing grammatical language.
2. Children must learn to construct a semantic relationship of their linguistic input by combining real world context and the meaning of individual words in the input.
3. Language addressed to a child must be accompanied by nonsyntactic cues.
4. Children must have some sort of innate knowledge of certain linguistic principles. For example, agents of transitive verbs are the subject of the sentence; in verb phrases, things that are affected by the action are typically objects; and nouns are the names of concrete objects, people, or places.

   1. The boy is patting the dog.

Upon hearing a sentence like (1), according to assumption 1, a child must know what the words <boy> and <dog> mean before they can start a grammatical analysis of the sentence.^[7]

According to assumption2, When the child sees the action - the boy patting the dog - the child can use this real life context to connect <the boy> to the noun phrase and <patting the dog> to the verb phrase. As a result, the child learns that <pat> is refers to the action of moving your hand on something in a certain way.

Syntactic boostrapping refers to the idea that children are able to deduce word meaning from the grammatical structure of a sentence. The knowledge of the grammatical structure of their language helps children learn word meaning by being able to recognize how phrase structure works and how phrases combined together to form sentences.

The idea of syntactic bootstrapping began with an experiment done by Roger Brown at Harvard University in 1957.^[8] Brown showed children between the ages of three and five various pictures that corresponded with nonsense words. The words shown in the pictures varied from singular nouns, mass nouns, and verbs. Brown showed these pictures to a child and asked them to tell him where the nonsense word was. By placing the word in different places in the sentence, different aspects of the picture were identifed by the children. For example, when Brown wanted the child to identify a mass noun, he would ask: “Do you see any sib?”, and the child would point at the red confetti-like mass in the picture. To identify a verb, the question was: “What is sibbing?”, and for a singular noun, it was: “Do you see a sib?”. The children were for the most part able to identify the objects in the picture depending on where the word was introduced in the question that Brown provided. This shows that the structure of a sentence provides children with valuable clues as to the meaning of words.

An early demonstration of syntactic bootstrapping involved showing 2 year olds a video of a duck using its left hand to push a rabbit down into a squatting position while both the animals waved their right arms in circles.^[9] During the video, children were given one of two descriptions of the video:

   1. The duck is kradding the rabbit.
   2. The rabbit and duck are kradding.

Children were then presented two videos. One showed the duck pushing the rabbit; the other showed both animals waving their arms in the air. When asked to "find kradding", children looked to the video that illustrated the syntax they heard during the initial video. Children who heard (1) interpreted "kradding" to mean the act of the duck pushing on the rabbit, while children who heard (2) assumed "kradding" was the action of arm waving. This illustrates that children arrive at different interpretations of a unfamiliar verb based on the context and structure in which it was embedded.

In 1990, Lila Gleitman took this idea further by examining the acquisition of verbs in more detail.^[10] In her study, she found that children could differentiate between verbs that take one or more arguments and this knowledge was used to help them narrow down the potential meanings for the verb in question. This discovery explains how children can learn the meaning of verbs that cannot be observed, like ‘think’.

Prosodic bootstrapping or phonological bootstrapping, first introduced by Lila Gleitman and Eric Wanner, refers to the idea that prosodic information, including stress, rhythm, and intonation, may assist a child in discovering the grammatical structure of their native language. Gleitman and Wanner originally proposed that these prosodic details may assist infants in discovering syntactic boundaries, even before they can comprehend word meaning.^[11] Prosodic information can also include phonetic cues such as pitch, pauses, and accent. In general, prosody introduces various features of a speaker or utterance. This can include the emotional state of the speaker, whether the utterance is a question, statement, or command; the presence of irony or sarcasm, and contrast. Similarly, in sign language, prosody includes facial expression, mouthing, and the rhythm, length, and tension of gestures and signs.

In language, words are not only categorized into phrases, clauses, and sentences. Words are also organized into prosodic envelopes. The idea of a prosodic envelope states that words that go together syntactically also form a similar intonation pattern. This approach explains how children discover syllable and word boundaries through prosodic cues. Overall, prosodic bootstrapping explores determining grammatical groupings in a speech stream rather than learning word meaning.^[7]

There is evidence to suggest that the acquisition of native language prosodic qualities start before an infant is born. This is seen in neonate crying patterns, which demonstrate qualities that are similar to the prosody of their native language.^[12] The only plausible way that an infant could be born with this ability is if these prosodic language patterns are learned in utero. Further evidence of young infants utilizing prosodic cues is infants’ abilities to discriminate the acoustic property of pitch change by 1-2 months old.^[13]

Infants and young children receive much of their language input in the form of infant-directed speech and child-directed speech, which are characterized as having exaggerated prosody and simplification of words and grammar structure. When interacting with infants and children, adults often raise and widen their pitch, and reduce their speech rate.^[14] However, these cues vary across cultures and across languages. There are several ways in which infant and child directed speech can facilitate language acquisition. In recent studies, it is shown that IDS and CDS contain prosodic information that may help infants and children distinguish between paralinguistic expressions (Eg. Gasps, laughs, expressions.) and informative speech.^[15] In Western cultures, mothers speak to their children using exaggerated intonation and pauses, which offer insight about syntactic groupings such as noun phrases, verb phrases, and prepositional phrases.^[7] This suggests that the linguistic input infants and children receive include some automatic bracketing around syntactically relevant chunks.

   1. Look the boy is patting the dog with his hand.
   2. * Look the boy ... is ... patting the ... dog with his ... hand.
   3. The boy ... is patting the dog ... with his hand.

In a sentence like (1), we do not typically produce the sentence with pauses, as indicated in (2). Most often, we produce the sentence by grouping our productions into grammatically packages that indicate the beginnings and ends of noun phrases, verb phrases, and prepositional phrases. As a result, we produce sentences like (3).^[7]

Moreover, within these phrases are distinct patterns of stress, which helps to differentiate individual elements within the phrase, such as a noun from an article. Typically, articles and other unbound morphemes are unstressed and are relatively short in duration in contrast to the pronunciation of nouns. Furthermore, in verb phrases, auxiliary verbs are less stressed than main verbs.^[7] This can be seen in (4).

   4. They are RUNning.

Prosodic bootstrapping states that these naturally occurring intonation packages help infants and children to bracket linguistic input into syntactic groupings. Currently, there is not enough evidence to suggest that prosodic cues in IDS and CDS facilitate in the acquisition of more complex syntax, however IDS and CDS are richer linguistic inputs for infants and children.

There is continued research into whether infants use prosodic cues – in particular, pauses – when processing clauses and phrases. Clauses are the largest constituent structure in a phrase and are often produced in isolation in conversation; for example, <Did you walk the dog?>.^[16] Consequently, phrases are smaller components of clauses. For example, <the tall man> or <walks his dog>.^[16] Peter W. Jusczyk argued that infants use prosody to parse speech into smaller units for analysis. He, along with colleagues, reported that 4.5 month old infants illustrated a preference for artificial pauses at clause boundaries in comparison to pauses at other places in a sentence.^[17] By preferring pauses at clause boundaries, this illustrates infants' abilities to discriminate clauses in a passage. This reveals that while infants do not understand word meaning, they are in the process of learning about native language and grammatical structure. In a separate study, Jusczyk reported that 9 month old infants preferred passages with pauses occurring between subject-noun phrases and verb phrases. These results are further evidence of infant sensitivity for syntactic boundaries.^[18] In a follow up study by LouAnn Gerken et al., researchers compared sentences such as (1) and (2). The prosodic boundaries are indicated by parentheses.^[19]

   5. (Joe)(kissed the dog).
   6. (He kissed)(the dog).

In (1), there is a pause before the verb <kissed>. This is also the location of the subject-verb phrase boundary. Comparably in (2), which contains a weak pronoun, speakers either do not produce a salient prosodic boundary or place the boundary after the verb <kissed>. When tested, 9 month old infants illustrated a preference for pauses located before the verb, such as in (1). However, when passages with pronoun subjects were used, such as in (2), infants did not show a preference for where the pause occurs.^[19] While these results again illustrate that infants are sensitive to prosodic cues in speech, they introduce evidence that infants prefer prosodic boundaries that occur naturally in speech. Although the use of prosody in infant speech processing is generally viewed as assisting infants in speech parsing, it has not yet been established how this speech segmentation enriches the acquisition of syntax.^[16]

Critics of prosodic bootstrapping have argued that the reliability of prosodic cues has been overestimated and that prosodic boundaries don't always match up with syntactic boundaries. It is argued instead that while prosody does provide infants and children useful clues about a language, it does not explain how children learn to combine clauses, phrases, and sentences, nor word meaning. As a result, prosodic bootstrapping must be combined with other forms of bootstrapping and language acquisition mechanisms to facilitate comprehensive language learning.

Pragmatic bootstrapping refers to how pragmatic cues and their use in social context assist in language acquisition, and more specifically, word learning. Pragmatic cues are illustrated both verbally and through nonlinguistic cues. They include hand gesture, eye movement, a speaker's focus of attention, intentionality, and linguistic context. Similarly, the parsimonious model proposes that a child learns word meaning by relating language input to their immediate environment.^[20] An example of Pragmatic Bootstrapping would be a teacher saying the word <dog> while gesturing to a dog in the presence of a child.

Children are able to associate words with actions or objects by following the gaze of their communication partner. Often, this occurs when an adult labels an action or object while looking at it.

In 1993, researchers showed 18 month olds two novel objects and then concealed them in separate containers. The experimenters would then peek into one of the containers and say, "There's a modi in here"; and then remove both objects from the container and give them to the child. When asked for the "modi", the child would hold up the object that the experimenter had been looking at when they labelled the object.^[21] This illustrates how children use eye gaze and labelling to learn the name of novel objects.

In an experiment by Michael Tomasello and colleagues ^[22], researchers performed a “Show Me Widget” test where a novel and nameless action was performed with a novel and nameless object. The experimenter would perform the action with the object and then pass the object to the child and instruct the child to "widget". The experimenter's behaviour before they passed the child the object was manipulated between two conditions:

  Action Highlighted Condition: The experimenter would prepare an object the child would use to perform a specific action by correctly orientating the object. The experimenter would then hold out the object and say, "Widget, Jason! Your turn!".  

  Object Highlighted Condition: The experimenter would not prepare the object for the child and would simply hold out the object to the child and say, "Widget, Jason! Your turn!". 

The results from the experiment illustrated that children in the Action Highlighted Condition associated the novel word with the novel action, whereas the children in the Object Highlighted Condition assumed the novel word referred to the novel object. To understand that the novel word referred to the novel action, children had to learn from the experimenter's nonverbal behaviour that they were requesting the action of the object. This illustrates how nonlinguistic context influences novel word learning.

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