Development of cross-linguistic variation in speech and gesture: motion events in English and Turkish

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and English, 2 typologically distinct languages. They found that children learn to speak in language-specific ways from age 3 onward (i.e., English speakers used 1 clause and Turkish speakers used 2 clauses to express manner and path). In contrast, English- and Turkish-speaking children's gestures looked similar at ages 3 and 5 (i.e., separate gestures for manner and path), differing from each other only at age 9 and in adulthood (i.e., English speakers used 1 gesture, but Turkish speakers used separate gestures for manner and path). The authors argue that this pattern of the development of cospeech gestures reflects a gradual shift to language-specific representations during speaking and shows that looking at speech alone may not be sufficient to understand the full process of language acquisition.     

Twenty four-month-old infants’ interpretations of novel verbs and nouns in dynamic scenes

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants’ well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather surprising failures to do so in many laboratory-based tasks. We presented 24-month-old infants with dynamic scenes (e.g., a man waving a balloon), and asked (a) whether infants could construe these scenes flexibly, noticing the consistent action (e.g., waving) as well as the consistent object (e.g., the balloon) and (b) whether their construals of the scenes were influenced by the grammatical form of a novel word used to describe them (verb or noun). We document that 24-month-olds’ representations of novel words are sufficiently precise to permit them to map novel verbs to event categories (e.g., waving events) and novel nouns to object categories (e.g., balloons). We also document the time-course underlying infants’ mapping of the novel words. These results beckon us to move beyond asking whether or not infants can represent verb meanings, and to consider instead the conditions that support successful verb learning in infants and young children.     

The dimensional arrow: Agreement in directional mapping of dimensions among Mandarin Chinese- and English-speakers

We present evidence that English- and Mandarin-speakers agree about how to map dimensions (e.g., size and clarity) to vertical space and that they do so in a directional way. We first developed visual stimuli for four dimensions—size, clarity, complexity, and darkness—and in each case we varied the stimuli to express a range of the dimension (e.g., there were five total items expressing the range covering big, medium, and small). In our study, English- and Mandarin-speakers mapped these stimuli to an unlabelled vertical scale. Most people mapped dimensional endpoints in similar ways; using size as a standard, we found that the majority of participants mapped the clearest, most complex, and darkest items to the same end of the vertical scale as they mapped the biggest items. This indicates that all four dimensions have a weighted or unmarked end (i.e., all are directional or polar). The strong similarities in polarity across language groups contrasted with group differences on a lexical task, for which there was little cross-linguistic agreement about which comparative words to use to describe stimulus pairs (e.g., “bigger” vs. “smaller”). Thus, we found no evidence in this study that the perception of these dimensions is influenced by language.     

Using Language to Navigate the Infant Mind

ABSTRACT— How do infants represent objects, actions, and relations in events? In this review, we discuss an approach to studying this question that begins with linguistic theory—specifically, semantic structures in language. On the basis of recent research exploring infant cognition and prominent linguistic analyses, we examine whether infants' representations of motion events are articulated in terms of the components proposed by Talmy (1985 ; e.g., path, manner) and whether infants' event representations are defined in terms of broad semantic roles (agent, patient, source, goal) as proposed by Jackendoff (1990) and Dowty (1991) . We show how recent findings in infant cognition are consistent with the idea that the infant's representation of events is a close reflection of the linguistic categories. We especially highlight research that is explicitly guided by linguistic categories likely to have correlates in nonlinguistic cognition to illustrate the usefulness of using language to pose questions about early conceptual representations.     

Motion-Verb Generalizations in English and Spanish: Influences of Language and Syntax

English and Spanish speakers differ in the ways they talk about motion events, but how have these different modes of expression become instantiated as differing generalizations—as syntactic rules, lexical patterns, or both? In two studies, we asked English- and Spanish-speaking adults to interpret novel motion verbs presented in three types of sentence frames. Overall, English speakers expected novel verbs to encode the manner of motion, whereas Spanish speakers expected the verbs to encode the path of motion. The sentence frames also significantly affected how the speakers interpreted the novel verbs. We conclude that speakers of different languages represent their different generalizations about the composition of motion verbs both lexically and syntactically, and discuss how these generalizations might be important for issues of language acquisition and linguistic relativity.     

Synchronous change and perception of object unity: evidence from adults and infants.

Adults and infants display a robust ability to perceive the unity of a center-occluded object when the visible ends of the object undergo common motion (e.g. Kellman, P.J., Spelke, E.S., 1983. Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology 15, 483-524). Ecologically oriented accounts of this ability focus on the primary of motion in the perception of segregated objects, but Gestalt theory suggests a broader possibility: observers may perceive object unity by detecting patterns of synchronous change, of which common motion is a special case. We investigated this possibility with observations of adults and 4-month-old infants. Participants viewed a center-occluded object whose visible surfaces were either misaligned or aligned, stationary or moving, and unchanging or synchronously changing in color or brightness in various temporal patterns (e.g. flashing). Both alignment and common motion contributed to adults' perception of object unity, but synchronous color changes did not. For infants, motion was an important determinant of object unity, but other synchronous changes and edge alignment were not. When a stationary object with aligned edges underwent synchronous changes in color or brightness, infants showed high levels of attention to the object, but their perception of its unity appeared to be indeterminate. An inherent preference for fast over slow flash rates, and a novelty preference elicited by a change in rate, both indicated that infants detected the synchronous changes, although they failed to use them as information for object unity. These findings favor ecologically oriented accounts of object perception in which surface motion plays a privileged role.     

Meanings,propositions, and verbs

The event template for a verb is a lexical representation of the type of event that the verb can denote. Manner of motion verbs have a simple template: An entity is engaged in a manner of motion activity (e.g., walk). Change of location verbs have a different template: An entity changes from one location to another (e.g., arrive). We propose, and support empirically, that these templates determine the propositional structures of sentences in which the verbs are used.     

The privileging of ‘Support-From-Below’ in early spatial language acquisition

Spatial terms that encode support (e.g., “on”, in English) are among the first to be understood by children across languages (e.g., Bloom, 1973; Johnston & Slobin, 1979). Such terms apply to a wide variety of support configurations, including Support-From-Below (SFB; cup on table) and Mechanical Support, such as stamps on envelopes, coats on hooks, etc. Research has yet to delineate infants’ semantic space for the term “on” when considering its full range of usage. Do infants initially map “on” to a very broad, highly abstract category – one including cups on tables, stamps on envelopes, etc.? Or do infants begin with a much more restricted interpretation - mapping “on” to certain configurations over others? Much infant cognition research suggests that SFB is an event category that infants learn about early - by five months of age (Baillargeon & DeJong, 2017) - raising the possibility that they may also begin by interpreting the word “on” as referring to configurations like cups on tables, rather than stamps on envelopes. Further, studies examining language production suggests that children and adults map the basic locative expression (BE on, in English) to SFB over Mechanical Support (Landau et al., 2016). We tested the hypothesis that this ‘privileging’ of SFB in early infant cognition and child and adult language also characterizes infants’ language comprehension. Using the Intermodal-Preferential-Looking-Paradigm in combination with infant eye-tracking, 20-month-olds were presented with two support configurations: SFB and Mechanical, Support-Via-Adhesion (henceforth, SVA). Infants preferentially mapped “is on” to SFB (rather than SVA) suggesting that infants differentiate between two quite different kinds of support configurations when mapping spatial language to these two configurations and more so, that SFB is privileged in early language understanding of the English spatial term “on”.     

Who is crossing where? Infants' discrimination of figures and grounds in events

To learn relational terms such as verbs and prepositions, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components. This paper investigates the way in which 8- to 14-month-old English-reared infants notice the event components, figure (i.e., the moving entity) and ground (i.e., stationary setting), in both dynamic (Experiment 1) and static representations of events (Experiment 2) for categorical ground distinctions expressed in Japanese, but not in English. We then compare both 14- and 19-month-old English- and Japanese-reared infants’ processing of grounds to understand how language learning interacts with the conceptualization of these constructs (Experiment 3). Results suggest that (1) infants distinguish between figures and grounds in events; (2) they do so differently for static vs. dynamic displays; (3) early in the second year, children from diverse language environments form nonnative – perhaps universal – event categories; and (4) these event categories shift over time as children have more exposure to their native tongue.     

Eye Movements Reveal the Dynamic Simulation of Speed in Language

This study investigates how speed of motion is processed in language. In three eye‐tracking experiments, participants were presented with visual scenes and spoken sentences describing fast or slow events (e.g., The lion ambled/dashed to the balloon). Results showed that looking time to relevant objects in the visual scene was affected by the speed of verb of the sentence, speaking rate, and configuration of a supporting visual scene. The results provide novel evidence for the mental simulation of speed in language and show that internal dynamic simulations can be played out via eye movements toward a static visual scene.     

The relation between infants' activity with objects and attention to object appearance

The authors examined the relation between infants' motor skills and attention to objects features in events in which a hand acted on an object (e.g., squeezed it) that then produced a sound (e.g., squeaking). In this study, 6- to 7-month-old infants (N = 41) were habituated to a single event and then tested with changes in appearance and action. Infants robustly responded to changes in action, but as a group did not respond to changes in appearance. Moreover, more skilled activity with objects during naturalistic play was associated with longer looking in response to a change in appearance, but not to a change in action. Implications for the relation between perception and action in infancy are discussed. (     

Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition

All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding articles (e.g., la and el, the feminine and masculine forms of "the," respectively). Adult native speakers of languages with grammatical gender exploit this cue in on-line sentence interpretation. In a study investigating the early development of this ability, Spanish-learning children (34-42 months) were tested in an eye-tracking procedure. Presented with pairs of pictures with names of either the same grammatical gender (la pelota, "ball [feminine]"; la galleta, "cookie [feminine]") or different grammatical gender (la pelota; el zapato, "shoe [masculine]"), they heard sentences referring to one picture (Encuentra la pelota, "Find the ball"). The children were faster to orient to the referent on different-gender trials, when the article was potentially informative, than on same-gender trials, when it was not, and this ability was correlated with productive measures of lexical and grammatical competence. Spanish-learning children who can speak only 500 words already use gender-marked articles in establishing reference, a processing advantage characteristic of native Spanish-speaking adults.     

Object play as a mediator of the role of exploration in communication skills development

In this study, we investigated exploration and language development, particularly whether preliminary object play mediates the role of exploration in gesture and speech production. We followed 27 infants, aged 8–17 months, and gathered data on the frequency of their exploration, preliminary functional acts with single or multiple objects, and communicative behaviors (e.g., gesturing and single-word utterances). The results of our path analysis indicated that exploration had a direct effect on single-object play, which, in turn, affected gesturing and advanced object play. Gesturing as well as single and multi-object play affected speech production. These findings suggest that exploration is associated with language development. This association may be facilitated by object play milestones in which infants recall the object’s function, which strengthens their memory and representation skills. Further, recalling the usage of an object by the caregivers may encourage an infant’s overall imitation tendency, which is important for learning how to communicate with gestures and words.     

Infants' understanding of object-directed action

When and in what ways do infants recognize humans as intentional actors? An important aspect of this larger question concerns when infants recognize specific human actions (e.g. a reach) as object-directed (i.e. as acting toward goal-objects). In two studies using a visual habituation technique, 12-month-old infants were tested to assess their recognition that an adult's reach is directed toward its target object. Infants in the experimental condition were habituated to a display in which an actor reached over a wall-like barrier with an arcing arm movement, to pick up a ball. After habituation infants saw two test displays, for which the barrier was removed. In the direct test event the actor reached directly for the ball, the arm tracing a visually new path, but the action consistent with attempting to reach for the object as directly as possible. In the indirect test event the actor traced the old path, reaching over in an arc, even though the wall was no longer present. This arm movement was identical to that in habituation but no longer displayed a reach going directly to its object. In a control condition infants saw the same movements but in a situation with no goal-object. In the experimental conditions, with a goal object present, infants looked longer at the indirect test event in comparison to the direct test event. In the control conditions infants looked equally at both indirect and direct test events. We conclude that sensitivity to human object-directed action is established by 12-month-olds and compare these results to recent findings by [Gergely, G., Nadasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Biro S. (1995). Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition, 56, 165-193] and [Woodward, A. (1998). Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach. Cognition, 69, 1-34].