A term used in developmental psychology to indicate that one ability provides leverage for acquiring a second, different ability. The prior ability sets conditions under which the latter can be more easily acquired. Thus, achievement of later stages is facilitated by what the developing child already knows. Put another way bootstrapping is a mechanism of transition from one developmental stage or state to another (more complex) stage or state. As such, it has been proposed that brain development is characterised by bootstrapping, with its most frequent application being in terms of aspects of the mechanisms of language development. Certainly, the metaphor of bootstrapping has been around for a long time (as, for example, in the saying “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”), and it has a broad appeal across a variety of disciplines as a means of understanding how the endpoint of some process of change qualitative transcends its staring point. Bootstrapping is also term used in testing the reliability of complex datasets by allowing assessments of whether the distribution of data points has been influenced by stochastic effects.
See Control parameter, Emergence, Language development, Mechanism, Metaphor, Process, Quantitative and qualitative change, Semantic bootstrapping, Stochasticity, Syntactic bootstrapping