Cues to Event Individuation Used by Pre-Schoolers

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Description (provided by applicant): The purpose of this project is to investigate how pre-school age children parse events into units -- that is, how they individuate events. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 years old will be tested in variants of the event counting task of Wagner & Carey (2003). Participants are shown animated movies that depict the enactment of an identifiable goal (such as painting a flower) achieved through several spatio-temporally discrete process steps (such as brush-strokes). The participants' task is to count what happens in the movie and the dependent measure is whether participants count goal units or spatio-temporal units. The project examines pre-schooler's abilities to use a variety of different kinds of cues to event individuation, from the linguistic (e.g syntactic frames, mass/count syntax), the conceptual (e.g. the agency of the actors and the number of objects present), to the situational (e.g. the relative novelty or familiarity of the event involved). Event individuation is important for understanding actions in the world. Moreover, it is a critical first step for identifying the potential referent of a linguistic predicate. Understanding how children break events down into units will provide important insight into the development of a basic feature of cognition, as well as into an enduring problem in language acquisition, namely, how children learn the meanings of verbs. In addition to contributing to our general understanding of the building blocks of human cognitive development, therefore, the results from this project may also prove helpful for our understanding of the development of language disorders.