The relationship between pre-verbal event representations and semantic structures: The case of goal and source paths

Lakusta, Laura; Spinelli, Danielle; Garcia, Kathryn

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.04.003

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Evidence from infants does not support this: sensitivity to goals and recipients develops around the same time (roughly the first birthday). As described above, Lakusta, Spinelli et al (2017) found that 10-month-olds represented an abstract category of Goal. In a study of recipient encoding, Schöppner, Sodian, and Pauen (2006) habituated infants to scenes of a human-like puppet giving a flower to another human-like puppet.…”

Section: Recipients Goals and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…Infants, even as young as 10 months, represent an abstract Goal category when viewing motion events. For example, Lakusta, Spinelli, and Garcia (2017a) familiarized 10- and 14.5-month-olds to events of an agentive entity moving to different goals, for example, a duck moving up to a tree (an AT-path event) or onto a box (an ON-path event). At test, infants looked longer at an event of a duck moving out of a bowl (a source path) than moving into a bowl (an IN-path event), indicating the infants had generalized IN-path events as being part of the same category as AT-path and ON-path events.…”

Section: Recipients Goals and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sources are represented in terms of an abstract category. Lakusta, Spinelli et al (2017) found, for example, that 14.5-month old infants generalized over events with sources (e.g., a plane flying out of a bowl, a bird walking away from a tree) when the source objects were highly visually salient. In addition, Lakusta and Landau (2005) found adults described source paths more often when they were primed with a source-encoding verb such as unhook.…”

Section: Recipients Goals and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?

Rissman

Majid

2019

Psychon Bull Rev

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The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role. For Agents and Patients, there is strong evidence for abstract role categories and a universal bias to distinguish the two roles. For Goals and Recipients, we find clear evidence for abstraction but mixed evidence as to whether there is a bias to encode Goals and Recipients as part of one or two distinct categories. Finally, we discuss the Instrumental role and do not find clear evidence for either abstraction or universal biases to structure instrumental categories.

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Section: Recipients Goals and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Recipients Goals and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Recipients Goals and Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?

Rissman

Majid

2019

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies in the infant event perception literature which show that babies treat recipients and destinations as a single construct. There are experiments showing that infants represent possession, or at least desire (e.g., Woodward, 1998), and there are experiments showing that they encode destinations (e.g., Lakusta, Spinelli, & Garcia, 2017). But we know of no work that shows that they generalize across these constructs.…”

Section: "Goals" In Linguistics and Cognitive Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

How broad are thematic roles? Evidence from structural priming

Ziegler

Snedeker

2018

Cognition

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Verbs that are similar in meaning tend to occur in the same syntactic structures. For example, give and hand, which denote transfer of possession, both appear in the prepositional-object construction: "The child gave/handed the ball to the dog." We can call the child a "giver" in one case and a "hander" in the other, or we can refer to her more generally as the agent, or doer of the action. Similarly, the dog can be called the recipient, and the ball, the theme. These generalized notions of agent, recipient, and theme are known as thematic roles. An important theoretical question for linguists and psycholinguists is what the set of thematic roles is. Are there a small number of very broad roles, perhaps with each one mapping onto a single canonical syntactic position? Or are there many distinct roles, several mapping to the same syntactic position but conveying subtly different meanings? We investigate this question across eleven structural priming experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (total N = 2914), asking whether speakers treat the thematic roles recipient and destination (i.e., location or spatial goal) as interchangeable, suggesting the broad role of goal, or distinct, suggesting two separate roles. To do so, we look for priming between dative sentences (e.g., "The man gave the ball to the dog"), which have a recipient role (dog), and locative sentences (e.g., "The man loaded hay onto the wagon"), which instead have a destination role (wagon). Our pattern of findings confirms that thematic role mappings can be primed independent of syntactic structure, lexical content, and animacy. However, we find that this priming does not extend from destinations to recipients (or vice versa), providing evidence that these two roles are distinct.

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“…For example, several studies show that infants can parse the components of agentive motion events that are represented in language, such as action sources, goals, and manners (e.g., Konishi, Pruden, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016;Lakusta, Wagner, O'Hearn, & Landau, 2007). Similar to verbal narratives of events (Jackendoff, 1990), looking-time studies also show that infants can categorize goals on a broad and abstract level (Lakusta, Spinelli, & Garcia, 2017) and are more likely demonstrate a bias towards attending to action goals as opposed to source or manners (e.g., Lakusta & DiFabrizio, 2017;Lakusta et al, 2007). These findings dovetail with the goal biases seen when older children are asked to verbally describe motion events (Lakusta & Landau, 2005), suggesting a connection between early attentional preference and subsequent narratives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%