Fast mapping poses two problems for associationism. The first is that the learning of a new word did not develop slowly, as would be predicted by proponents of gradual learning. The second is that in order for the word learning to proceed, the mind must have been aided by additional principles not given by the environment. Some of these principles such as Markman’s (1989) taxonomic, whole object, and mutual exclusivity constraints, and Gleitman’s syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman et al. 2005), imply that the mind does add structure to what is learned. Consequently, the associationist claim that learning is just mapping external contingencies without adding structure is imperiled.