Two experiments are discussed--one with normal 3 to 5-year-olds and one with language impaired 4 to 5-year-olds--that investigated the role of inflections in verb learning. Findings point to a developmental period during which children treat inflectional cues as reliable guides to verb meaning. Focuses on the rise and fall of such inflectional bootstrapping and the linguistic character of the same-result bias that replaces it. (Author/VWL)