TY - JOUR
T1 - Who is crossing where? Infants' discrimination of figures and grounds in events
AU - Göksun, Tilbe
AU - Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy
AU - Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick
AU - Imai, Mutsumi
AU - Konishi, Haruka
AU - Okada, Hiroyuki
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by NICHD Grant 5R01HD050199 and by NSF grants BCS-0642529 to the second and third authors, Japan Ministry of Education KAKENHI Grant 18300089 and Tamagawa University Global Center of Excellence (GCOE) program to the fourth and last author, respectively. Portions of this research have been presented at the 16th International Conference on Infant Studies, at the 11th Meeting of International Association for the Study of Child Language, and at the 33rd and 34th Meetings of Boston University Conference on Language Development. We would like to thank everyone at the Temple University Infant Lab, the University of Delaware Infant Language Project, Keio University Imai Lab, and Tamagawa University Baby Lab for their invaluable contributions to this project. Special thanks to Nora Newcombe for insightful comments on each study, Sarah Roseberry for discussions on many issues about the studies, Wendy Shallcross, Yannos Misitzis, Katrina Ferrara, Russell Richie, and Aimee Stahl for their help in data collection. We would also like to express our deepest appreciation to all of the parents and infants who participated in the study.
PY - 2011/11
Y1 - 2011/11
N2 - To learn relational terms such as verbs and prepositions, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components. This paper investigates the way in which 8- to 14-month-old English-reared infants notice the event components, figure (i.e., the moving entity) and ground (i.e., stationary setting), in both dynamic (Experiment 1) and static representations of events (Experiment 2) for categorical ground distinctions expressed in Japanese, but not in English. We then compare both 14- and 19-month-old English- and Japanese-reared infants' processing of grounds to understand how language learning interacts with the conceptualization of these constructs (Experiment 3). Results suggest that (1) infants distinguish between figures and grounds in events; (2) they do so differently for static vs. dynamic displays; (3) early in the second year, children from diverse language environments form nonnative - perhaps universal - event categories; and (4) these event categories shift over time as children have more exposure to their native tongue.
AB - To learn relational terms such as verbs and prepositions, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components. This paper investigates the way in which 8- to 14-month-old English-reared infants notice the event components, figure (i.e., the moving entity) and ground (i.e., stationary setting), in both dynamic (Experiment 1) and static representations of events (Experiment 2) for categorical ground distinctions expressed in Japanese, but not in English. We then compare both 14- and 19-month-old English- and Japanese-reared infants' processing of grounds to understand how language learning interacts with the conceptualization of these constructs (Experiment 3). Results suggest that (1) infants distinguish between figures and grounds in events; (2) they do so differently for static vs. dynamic displays; (3) early in the second year, children from diverse language environments form nonnative - perhaps universal - event categories; and (4) these event categories shift over time as children have more exposure to their native tongue.
KW - Cross-language comparison
KW - Event perception
KW - Figure and ground
KW - Prelinguistic constructs
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.002
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.002
M3 - Article
C2 - 21839990
AN - SCOPUS:81155159764
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 121
SP - 176
EP - 195
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 2
ER -