Crossing to the other side: Language influences children’s perception of event components

Abstract

Infants appear to progress from universal to language-specific event perception. In Japanese, two different verbs describe a person crossing a bounded ground (e.g., street) versus an unbounded ground (e.g., field) while in English, the same verb – crossing – describes both events. Interestingly, Japanese and English 14-month-old infants form categories of Japanese ground distinctions in nonlinguistic events while by 20 months, only Japanese-reared infants retain this ability. Five experiments were conducted to investigate the role that language plays in children’s ability to form categories of Japanese ground-path distinctions. Experiments 1a and 1b first replicated and extended prior research (Göksun et al., 2011) by showing that 14-month-old English-reared children formed categories of Japanese ground-path while 23-month-old children did not in the presence of general language. Experiment 2a paired a single novel word with different Japanese ground categories and found that language weakened 14-month-old infants’ categorization abilities. Experiment 2b showed that labeling these event types differentially allowed 23-month-olds to recognize the Japanese ground-path distinctions that they otherwise would not have detected. To assess whether language uniquely encouraged categorization of Japanese ground-path in Experiment 2b, two different tones were paired with ground-path categories in Experiment 3. The results of Experiments 2b and 3 suggested that language but not tones encouraged ground-path categorization. This study is among the first to show that language can be used to heighten and weaken children’s categorization of “non-native” event components.