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Perception of the social world in terms of agents and their intentional relations is fundamental to human experience. In this chapter, we review recent investigations into the origins of this fundamental ability that trace its roots to the first year of life. These studies show that infants represent others’ actions not as purely physical motions, but rather as actions directed at goals and objects of attention. Infants are able to recover intentional relations at varying levels of analysis, including concrete action goals, higher-order plans, acts of attention, and collaborative goals. There is mounting evidence that these early competencies are strongly influenced by infants’ own experience as intentional agents. Action experience shapes infants’ action perception.

Do 14-to 17-month-olds notice the paths and manners of motion events? English-and Spanishlearning infants were habituated to an animated motion event including a manner (e.g., spinning) and a path (e.g., over). They were then tested on 4 types of events that changed either the manner, the path, both, or neither component. Both English-and Spanish-learning infants attended to changes of manner and changes of path. Thus, infants from two different language communities proved sensitive to components of events that undergird relational term learning.

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This chapter considers infants' prelinguistic action knowledge and how this knowledge might be recruited for verb learning. There are at least two ways in which action knowledge could contribute to verb learning. First, understanding the actions of others is critical for discerning their communicative intentions, and thus provides a foundation for all aspects of language learning not just verb learning. Second, infants' action knowledge must provide some of the initial elements of meaning which come to be conveyed in verbs. The chapter focuses on the second of these issues, since it is unique to verb learning.