Tilbe Göksun

Trading Spaces Carving Up Events for Learning Language

Relational terms (e.g., verbs and prepositions) are the cornerstone of language development, bringing together two distinct fields: linguistic theory and infants’ event processing. To acquire relational terms such as run, walk, in, and on, infants must first perceive and conceptualize components of dynamic events such as containment—support, path—manner, source—goal, and figure—ground. Infants must then uncover how the particular language they are learning encodes these constructs. This review addresses the interaction of language learning with infants’ conceptualization of these nonlinguistic spatial event components. We present the thesis that infants start with language-general nonlinguistic constructs that are gradually refined and tuned to the requirements of their native language. In effect, infants are trading spaces, maintaining their sensitivity to some relational distinctions while dampening other distinctions, depending on how their native language expresses these constructs.

Turkish children use morphosyntactic bootstrapping in interpreting verb meaning

How might syntactic bootstrapping apply in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to indicate grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis? We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative case marking and the causative morpheme. Data were collected from 60 child speakers and 16 adults. In an adaptation of Naigles, Gleitman & Gleitman (1993), the participants acted out sentences (6 transitive and 6 intransitive verbs in four different frames). The enactments were coded for causativity. Causative enactments increased in two-argument frames and decreased in one-argument frames, albeit to a lesser extent than previously found in English. This effect was generally stronger in children than in adults. Causative enactments increased when the accusative case marker was present. The causative morpheme yielded no increase in causative enactments. These findings highlight roles for morphological and syntactic cues in verb learning by Turkish children.

Infant categorization of path relations during dynamic events.

Fundamental to amassing a lexicon of relational terms (i.e., verbs, prepositions) is the ability to abstract and categorize spatial relations such as a figure (e.g., boy) moving along a path (e.g., around the barn). Three studies examine how infants learn to categorize path over changes in manner, or how an action is performed (e.g., running vs. crawling). Experiment 1 (n = 60) finds that 10- to 12-month-old English-learning infants categorize a figures path. In Experiment 2 (n = 27) categorization is disrupted when the ground object is removed, suggesting the relation between figure and ground defines the path. Experiment 3 (n = 24) shows that language may be a mechanism guiding category formation. These studies suggest that English-learning infants can categorize path, a component lexicalized in the worlds languages.

Find Your Manners: How Do Infants Detect the Invariant Manner of Motion in Dynamic Events?

To learn motion verbs, infants must be sensitive to the specific event features lexicalized in their language. One event feature important for the acquisition of English motion verbs is the manner of motion. This article examines when and how infants detect manners of motion across variations in the figures path. Experiment 1 shows that 13- to 15-month-olds (N = 30) can detect an invariant manner of motion when the figures path changes. Experiment 2 reveals that reducing the complexity of the events, by dampening the figures path, helps 10- to 12-month-olds (N = 19) detect the invariant manner. These findings suggest that: (a) infants notice event features lexicalized in English motion verbs, and (b) attention to manner can be promoted by reducing event complexity.

The development of organized visual search

Visual search plays an important role in guiding behavior. Children have more difficulty performing conjunction search tasks than adults. The present research evaluates whether developmental differences in childrens ability to organize serial visual search (i.e., search organization skills) contribute to performance limitations in a typical conjunction search task. We evaluated 134 children between the ages of 2 and 17 on separate tasks measuring search for targets defined by a conjunction of features or by distinct features. Our results demonstrated that children organize their visual search better as they get older. As childrens skills at organizing visual search improve they become more accurate at locating targets with conjunction of features amongst distractors, but not for targets with distinct features. Developmental limitations in childrens abilities to organize their visual search of the environment are an important component of poor conjunction search in young children. In addition, our findings provide preliminary evidence that, like other visuospatial tasks, exposure to reading may influence childrens spatial orientation to the visual environment when performing a visual search.

Naming and gesturing spatial relations: Evidence from focal brain-injured individuals

Spatial language helps us to encode relations between objects and organize our thinking. Little is known about the neural instantiations of spatial language. Using voxel-lesion symptom mapping (VLSM), we tested the hypothesis that focal brain injured patients who had damage to left frontal-parietal peri-Sylvian regions would have difficulty in naming spatial relations between objects. We also investigated the relationship between impaired verbalization of spatial relations and spontaneous gesture production. Patients with left or right hemisphere damage and elderly control participants were asked to name static (e.g., an apple on a book) and dynamic (e.g., a pen moves over a box) locative relations depicted in brief video clips. The correct use of prepositions in each task and gestures that represent the spatial relations were coded. Damage to the left posterior middle frontal gyrus, the left inferior frontal gyrus, and the left anterior superior temporal gyrus were related to impairment in naming spatial relations. Production of spatial gestures negatively correlated with naming accuracy, suggesting that gestures might help or compensate for difficulty with lexical access. Additional analyses suggested that left hemisphere patients who had damage to the left posterior middle frontal gyrus and the left inferior frontal gyrus gestured less than expected, if gestures are used to compensate for impairments in retrieving prepositions.

Spontaneous gesture and spatial language: Evidence from focal brain injury.

People often use spontaneous gestures when communicating spatial information. We investigated focal brain-injured individuals to test the hypotheses that (1) naming motion event components of manner-path (represented by verbs-prepositions in English) are impaired selectively, (2) gestures compensate for impaired naming. Patients with left or right hemisphere damage (LHD or RHD) and elderly control participants were asked to describe motion events (e.g., running across) depicted in brief videos. Damage to the left posterior middle frontal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus, and left anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) produced impairments in naming paths of motion; lesions to the left caudate and adjacent white matter produced impairments in naming manners of motion. While the frequency of spontaneous gestures were low, lesions to the left aSTG significantly correlated with greater production of path gestures. These suggest that producing prepositions-verbs can be separately impaired and gesture production compensates for naming impairments when damage involves left aSTG.

Individual differences in mental rotation: what does gesture tell us?

Gestures are common when people convey spatial information, for example, when they give directions or describe motion in space. Here, we examine the gestures speakers produce when they explain how they solved mental rotation problems (Shepard and Meltzer in Science 171:701–703, 1971). We asked whether speakers gesture differently while describing their problems as a function of their spatial abilities. We found that low-spatial individuals (as assessed by a standard paper-and-pencil measure) gestured more to explain their solutions than high-spatial individuals. While this finding may seem surprising, finer-grained analyses showed that low-spatial participants used gestures more often than high-spatial participants to convey “static only” information but less often than high-spatial participants to convey dynamic information. Furthermore, the groups differed in the types of gestures used to convey static information: high-spatial individuals were more likely than low-spatial individuals to use gestures that captured the internal structure of the block forms. Our gesture findings thus suggest that encoding block structure may be as important as rotating the blocks in mental spatial transformation.

Sensation: Measuring the Effects of a Human-to-Human Social Touch Based Controller on the Player Experience

We observe an increasing interest on usage of full-body interaction in games. However, human-to-human social touch interaction has not been implemented as a sophisticated gaming apparatus. To address this, we designed the Sensation, a device for detecting touch patterns between players, and introduce the game, Shape Destroy, which is a collaborative game designed to be played with social touch. To understand if usage of social touch has a meaningful contribution to the overall player experience in collaborative games we conducted a user study with 30 participants. Participants played the same game using i) the Sensation and ii) a gamepad, and completed a set of questionnaires aimed at measuring the immersion levels. As a result, the collected data and our observations indicated an increase in general, shared, ludic and affective involvement with significant differences. Thus, human-to-human touch can be considered a promising control method for collaborative physical games.

Carving Categories in a Continuous World: Preverbal Infants Discriminate Categorical Changes Before Distance Changes in Dynamic Events

Abstract To learn motion verbs and prepositions, children must categorize event components such that jumping 1 meter over the puddle and jumping 3 meters over the puddle are both instances of jumping. Thus, childrens categories must allow variability in coordinate properties, while preserving the relational component labeled by motion verbs and prepositions. The current study asks if preverbal infants notice within-category distance changes (e.g., height of a jump) more than across-category distance changes, (e.g., over versus under). Results suggest that categorical changes are most important, which has implications for how children carve a continuous world into categories that coincide with language.