Toddler Arielle sees a baby being tickled by a boy and hears her mother say, The boy is tickling the baby. Arielle has never heard anyone use the...

Toddler Arielle sees a baby being tickled by a boy and hears her mother say, ìThe boy is tickling the baby.î Arielle has never heard anyone use the word ìtickling.î Arielle figures out that ìticklingî is what the boy is doing to the baby, not what the baby is doing (laughing and waving her arms in delight), through:

syntactic bootstrapping.

intersubjectivity.

fast mapping.

attending to the linguistic category of the novel word.