Syntactic Bootstrap

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This is a review of the Mercer Mayer book I Was So Mad. The story begins with a boy, who throughout the story is told no whenever he wants to do anything, making the boy angry. Eventually, he decides to pack and run away from home. As he is leaving his home, his friends arrive and want to play. The boy decides to play and says he will run away tomorrow. The book is only twelve pages long, so it should be engaging enough to keep a child’s attention. The vocabulary is slightly enhanced, and sentence length was vaguely extended. For these reasons a preschooler would be most likely to benefit from reading this book. There are sight words repeated throughout the book such as: I, was, wanted, to, mad, no, you, said. Additionally, this book …show more content…

159). Research by Naigles and Hoff-Ginsberg (1995) states “the plausibility of syntactic bootstrapping was investigated to the extent of the linguistic input mothers provide children. With verb acquisition, the claim that children use syntax to acquire verb meanings does not preclude their use of other sources of information. Syntactic bootstrapping of a verb meaning fits into an account of syntax acquisition, syntactic bootstrapping does require that the child know some syntax before using syntactic frames to acquire verb meanings (Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg, 1995).” Children acquire knowledge of words based off the context of the sentence. The multiple uses of sight words in I Was So Mad exhibits this hypothesis because repeated words were used in different sentence structures. Keep in mind that this thought process applies to syntactic structure of a sentence to help to define a novel …show more content…

Given these scenarios, the word meanings may not be communicated or accurate. Hence, children who happenstance novel words must use implied knowledge to distinguish information. Fast mapping relates to newly acquired or heard words, and the ability to consider a meaning after one to a few encounters with that word. Though this is not a total appropriation of a meaning, it is a starting point and even when children guess the meaning they are typically right or close in definition (Hoff, 2014, p.

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