Cues to Event Individuation Used by Pre-Schoolers

描述（由申请人提供）：这个项目的目的是调查学龄前儿童如何将事件解析成单元——也就是说，他们如何将事件个性化。2至5岁的儿童将在Wagner & Carey（2003）的事件计数任务的变体中进行测试。研究人员向参与者展示了动画电影，这些动画电影描绘了通过几个时空离散的过程步骤（比如笔触）实现一个可识别的目标（比如画一朵花）。参与者的任务是计算电影中发生的事情，依赖的测量是参与者是计算目标单位还是时空单位。

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.