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This paper reports an experiment in which adult native speakers of Dutch were asked to categorize nonce stems. These were presented without any morphological or other information about their potential class-membership. We expected that subjects would be able to categorize these words solely on the basis of phonological information. Nouns in Dutch have a richer possible syllablestructure than verbs (Trommelen 1989) and therefore, we expected that stimuli with a 'nominal' syllable make-up could be identified by the subjects as nouns where the other stimuli were ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The results show that this is indeed the case, adding to the evidence that native speakers of a language are able to use phonological information to categorize the words of their language. IntroductionIn this paper we report an experiment on the abilities of native Dutch speakers to determine the category of nonce words solely on the basis of phonological information. Research in the domain of language acquisition has proven that both the semantic and syntactic properties of words play an important role in the acquisition of word categories. In these studies it is proposed that certain correlations exist between syntactic properties of a word and its semantic properties, and it is demonstrated that children make use of these correlations in order to arrive at the correct meaning of a word, or to acquire certain syntactic properties (such as argument structure, category).In a famous study on language learnability, Pinker (1987) elaborates on a 'bootstrapping' mechanism of this type, claiming that children use the semantic properties of a word as a bootstrap to the syntactic structure. A bootstrapping mechanism such as Pinker's would enable the child to infer the syntactic category of a word from a rough semantic categorization like 'thing' , 'causal agent' , and 'true in the past' . Although this proposal has received a lot of criticism over the years, the basic idea that the semantic