Ann Bunger

The relation between event apprehension and utterance formulation in children: Evidence from linguistic omissions.

The relation between event apprehension and utterance formulation was examined in children and adults. English-speaking adults and 4-year-olds viewed motion events while their eye movements were monitored. Half of the participants in each age group described each event (Linguistic task), whereas the other half studied the events for an upcoming memory test (Nonlinguistic task). All participants then completed a memory test in which they identified changes to manners of motion and path endpoints in target events. In the Nonlinguistic task, eye movements and memory responses revealed striking similarities across age groups. Adults and preschoolers attended to manner and path endpoints with similar timing, and in the memory test both successfully detected manner and path changes at similar rates. Substantial differences in production emerged between age groups in the Linguistic task: whereas adults usually mentioned both manners and paths in their event descriptions, preschoolers tended to omit one event component or the other. However, eyegaze patterns remained equivalent across the two age groups, with both children and adults allocating more attention to event components that they planned to talk about. Children in the Linguistic task were at chance in the memory test, whereas adults actually showed a memory benefit as compared to the Nonlinguistic task. We conclude that developmental differences in the description of motion events are not due to pure attentional differences between adults and children, but leave open the possibility that they stem from limitations that are solely linguistic in nature or that arise at the interface of attention and language production.

How We Learn to Talk About Events: Linguistic and Conceptual Constraints on Verb Learning

To learn the meaning of a word, a language learner must map a linguistic unit onto a representation of the world provided by her conceptual system. A classic puzzle in the study of language acquisition concerns what constraints determine the set of hypotheses that a learner generates for the meaning of a novel word and what kinds of information help her to narrow down that set. My dissertation investigated the range of meanings that learners are willing to encode in single verbs associated with causative events and how those options are guided by the mapping between conceptual and linguistic event representations. To accomplish this, I asked three specific questions: first, which combinations of the subparts of a causative event learners are willing to encode in a single verb; second, how specific they are about the event features being encoded; and third, how they deal with conflicts between hypothesized verb meanings and new information from the extralinguistic context. My results demonstrate that the meanings that adult and 2-year-old word learners postulate for novel verbs are influenced both by cues to meaning provided by verb syntax and by more general constraints on the way that verb meanings can be related to event representations. From infancy, we represent causative events as being composed of a set of subevents associated in a hierarchical structure that reflects their partonomic relationships to one another (Leslie (1984), Zacks and Tversky (2001)). So, for example, a causative event in which a girl makes a ball bounce by hitting it with her hand would be represented as in (1), in which the first subpart [girl hits

How children and adults encode causative events cross-linguistically: implications for language production and attention

ABSTRACT This study investigates the implications of language-specific constraints on linguistic event encoding for the description and online inspection of causative events. English-speaking and Greek-speaking adults, 3-year-olds, and 4-year-olds viewed and described causative events, which are composed of Means and Result subevents, in an eye tracking study. The results demonstrate cross-linguistic and developmental differences in the informational content of causative event descriptions. Across age groups, Greek speakers were more likely than English speakers to mention only one causative subevent, and across language groups, adults were more likely than children to mention both subevents. Finally, for speakers in all age and language groups, preparing different types of event descriptions changed the way that events were visually inspected, shifting attention towards to-be-encoded subevents. These findings offer some of the first evidence about the development of the language production system, the attentional mechanisms that it employs, and its workings in speakers of different languages.