Conceptual Foundations of Spatial Language: Evidence for a Goal Bias in Infants

Lakusta, Laura; Wagner, Laura; O’Hearn, Kirsten; Landau, Barbara

doi:10.1080/15475440701360168

Cited by 88 publications

(134 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…This results in striking errors, wherein children initially assume that ''milking the cow'' involves putting milk onto a cow! This bias likely stems from a more fundamental goal bias in language and thought, which has been documented extensively in previous work (e.g., Lakusta and Landau, 2005;Lakusta et al, 2007;Papafragou, 2010;Regier, 1997). This example suggests that cross-linguistic data from polysemy can provide evidence and perhaps new hypotheses about the nature of conceptual structure.…”

Section: Limitations Of Our Datamentioning

confidence: 56%

How concepts and conventions structure the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy

Srinivasan

Rabagliati

2015

Lingua

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Please cite this article in press as: Srinivasan, M., Rabagliati, H., How concepts and conventions structure the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy. Lingua (2015) AbstractWords often have multiple distinct but related senses, a phenomenon called polysemy. For instance, in English, words like chicken and lamb can label animals and their meats while words like glass and tin can label materials and artifacts derived from those materials. In this paper, we ask why words have some senses but not others, and thus what constrains the structure of polysemy. Previous work has pointed to two different sources of constraints. First, polysemy could reflect conceptual structure: word senses could be derived based on how ideas are associated in the mind. Second, polysemy could reflect a set of arbitrary, language-specific conventions: word senses could be difficult to derive and might have to be memorized and stored. We used a large-scale cross-linguistic survey to elucidate the relative contributions of concepts and conventions to the structure of polysemy. We explored whether 27 distinct patterns of polysemy found in English are also present in 14 other languages. Consistent with the idea that polysemy is constrained by conceptual structure, we found that almost all surveyed patterns of polysemy (e.g., animal for meat, material for artifact) were present across languages. However, consistent with the idea that polysemy reflects language-specific conventions, we also found variation across languages in how patterns are instantiated in specific senses (e.g., the word for glass material is used to label different glass artifacts across languages). We argue that these results are best explained by a ''conventions-constrained-by-concepts'' model, in which the different senses of words are learned conventions, but conceptual structure makes some types of relations between senses easier to grasp than others, such that the same patterns of polysemy evolve across languages. This opens a new view of lexical structure, in which polysemy is a linguistic adaptation that makes it easier for children to learn word meanings and build a lexicon.

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Section: Limitations Of Our Datamentioning

confidence: 56%

How concepts and conventions structure the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy

Srinivasan

Rabagliati

2015

Lingua

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“…If precedence was the root cause of the current path bias, then the literature should be rife with process biases in all sorts of situations instead of the goal biases more commonly found. Moreover, there is a way to explicitly test this possibility with Directed Motion events, by using source objects instead of goal objects (cf Lakusta et al 2007). Instead of modeling an action path to a specific goal object, one could model a doll starting at a specific source object and then moving along an action path (stopping at the end of the trajectory but not at a specific object); thus, source precedes path.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These data suggest that for grasping events, goal information trumps path information in infants' representations. Adopting this paradigm to Directed Motion events, Lakusta, Wagner, O'Hearn and Landau (2007) showed infants a toy animal moving from one of two source objects to one of two goal objects. At test, the animal either moved from a different source object or moved to a different goal object.…”

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confidence: 99%

Children’s understanding of directed motion events in an imitation choice task

Wagner

Yocom

Greene-Havas

2008

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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We investigated children's understanding of directed motion events using an Imitation Choice paradigm. Thirty-four children (mean age 33 months) watched a model act out an event containing a manner of motion (hopping or sliding), a motion path (up or down a ramp), and a goal (in or on a bowl). On the child's apparatus, the locations of the goal objects were different from the model so that the child had to choose whether to imitate the path or the goal of the model's event. Children's choice of which component to imitate therefore reflects how they prioritize these event components. Most children showed no bias to imitate the goal of the event, and instead preferred to imitate the model's path at the expense of the model's goal. However, children who spontaneously played with the goal objects during a free-play session showed a diminished path preference, choosing to imitate path and goal components equally often. We suggest that children's prioritization of information within an event depends on how that information is structured within the event itself. Keywordsimitation; event representation; toddler; directed-motion event; goals Imitation is an important tool of social learning that allows humans to replay an event that just occurred in the same way they witnessed it. It is also an important window onto children's representations: successful imitation requires a child to adequately represent the event in question. Moreover, for revealing how they represent and organize information, children's failures are as important as their successes. For example, a child who successfully imitates a model's ultimate goal while failing to imitate the model's process steps (a case of "emulation") most likely has a representation of the event that privileges or prioritizes the goal of the event. And indeed, the dominant finding in the literature is that infants and toddlers are goal-biased in their representations. However, generalizing from children's failures and omissions is not without difficulty. A child who fails too often may simply not have the ability to do the task; a child who fails too rarely may not make representative mistakes. In addition, there is the problem of interpreting null results: children might fail to do something for many reasons. Obviously, systematic patterns of success and failure can be quite meaningful -and many such patterns will be discussed below. However, the method adopted in this paper opts for a different solution, by forcing children to make choices.

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“…Thus all age groups have had relatively less experience with the passive than the active, and the results show that there are more congruent active responses than passive responses for all age groups. The active construction also aligns with a non-linguistic preference for conceptually framing events as source-to-goal or instigatorpatient rather than the reverse (Lakusta and Landau, 2005;Lakusta, Wagner, O'Hearn & Landau, 2007). Nappa et al (2009) note that in many languages, verbs that align with this preference (e.g., chase) outnumber their asymmetric partners (e.g., flee).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

The attention-grammar interface: Eye-gaze cues structural choice in children and adults

Ibbotson

Lieven²,

Tomasello

2013

Cognitive Linguistics

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We investigated whether children (3-and 4-year-olds) and adults can use the active passive alternation -essentially a choice of subject-in a way that is consistent with the eye-gaze of the speaker. Previous work suggests the function of the subject position can be grounded in attentional mechanisms (Tomlin, 1995;1997). Eye-gaze is one powerful source of directing attention that we know adults and young children are sensitive to; furthermore, we know adults are more likely to look at the subject of their sentence than any other character (Gleitman, January, Nappa & Trueswell, 2007;Griffin & Bock, 2000). We demonstrate that older children and adults are able to use speaker-gaze to choose a felicitous subject when describing a scene with both agent-focused and patient focused cues. Integrating attentional and grammatical information in this way allows children to limit the degrees of freedom on what the function of certain linguistic constructions might be.

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Conceptual Foundations of Spatial Language: Evidence for a Goal Bias in Infants

Cited by 88 publications

References 30 publications

How concepts and conventions structure the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy

How concepts and conventions structure the lexicon: Cross-linguistic evidence from polysemy

Children’s understanding of directed motion events in an imitation choice task

The attention-grammar interface: Eye-gaze cues structural choice in children and adults

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