How children attend to events before speaking: crosslinguistic evidence from the motion domain

Abstract

How do children talk about the dynamic world around them? In this eyetracking study, we demonstrate language-specific patterns in the way 3- and 4-year-old speakers of English and Greek inspect motion events prior to speaking and describe such events in their native language. Across age and language groups, children were more likely to mention manners of motion than paths, but English-speaking children were more likely to provide manner information than Greek-speaking children were. Comparison of eyegaze patterns from the linguistic (description) task to eyegaze patterns observed during a nonlinguistic (memory) task with a different group of English- and Greek-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds revealed effects of language background on event inspection. These effects suggest that by the age of 3 years, children exhibit sensitivities to language-specific patterns of motion event encoding that influence the way they gather information from the visual world during the process of language production.