Linguistic and non-linguistic categorization of complex motion events

Abstract

Introduction Motion events play a central role in people's representation of the world. Not only is our perception of motion events crucial for safely navigating through the world and key to our survival; our conceptual understanding of motion events is necessary for interpreting other people's behavior, and for accurately communicating important aspects of an event to others. Despite the importance of event cognition in people's everyday functioning, most research on motion and event processing to date has been restricted to low-level phenomena associated with simple perception of motion, while studies investigating higher-level conceptual phenomena are few and far between. In recent years, however, there has been a growing body of interdisciplinary research on people's understanding of events (as we hope this volume has made apparent). Growing evidence indicates that we possess a very powerful system for processing events, especially for events involving acts of human motion (Baldwin 2005). Our conception of events appears crucial to our understanding of social behavior in two ways: the first, that we utilize our event processing system to understand people's intentions and goals, and the second, that we communicate the details of events to others using language. Given the importance of motion events in social functioning, it is no wonder that language systems around the world provide speakers with a rich set of lexical items with which to describe many of the details present in the complex stream of motion.