Weissenborn J., Höhle B. Approaches To Bootstrapping

Phonological, lexical, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition. Volume 1
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001. – 318 p. — (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders).Volume 1 of Approaches to Bootstrapping focuses on early word learning and syntactic development with special emphasis on the bootstrapping mechanisms by which the child using properties of the speech input enters the native linguistic system. Topics discussed in the area of lexical acquisition are: cues and mechanisms for isolating words in the input; special features of motherese and their role for early word learning; the determination of first word meanings; memory and related processing capacities in early word learning and understanding; and lexical representation and lexical access in early language production.
The papers on syntactic development deal with the acquisition of grammatical prosodic features for learning language specific syntactic regularities.
The two volumes making up Approaches to Bootstrapping present a state-of-the art interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic overview of recent developments in first language acquisition research.Early Word Learning and its Prerequisites
From Input Cues to Syntactic Knowledge