Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down itsprobable meaning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. A learner that uses syntacticbootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semanticinformation that a syntactic context provides. Based on the semantic seed hypothesis,children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic contexts by tracking thedistribution of familiar words. We propose that these learning mechanisms relate to a largercognitive model: the predictive processing framework. According to this model, weperceive and make sense of the world by constantly predicting what will happen next in aprobabilistic fashion. We outline evidence that prediction operates within languageacquisition, and show how this framework helps us understand the way lexical knowledgerefines syntactic predictions and how syntactic knowledge refines predictions about novelwords’ meanings. The predictive processing framework entails that learners can adapt torecent information and update their linguistic model. Here we review some of the recentexperimental work showing that the type of prediction preschool children make from asyntactic context can change when they are presented with convincing contrary evidencefrom recent input. We end by discussing some challenges of applying the predictiveprocessing framework to syntactic bootstrapping and propose new avenues to investigatein future work.