Doctoral Dissertation Research: Infant Event Representations and Verb Argument Structure

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Scherff and her advisor Dr. Perfetti will conduct a year long investigation of the possibility that prelinguistic infants identify the same kinds of structures in observed events that languages identify with verb argument structure. The verb argument structure is a highly constrained format for describing events in language. Infants' ability to map events in the world onto concepts such as "give" and "hug" raises questions about both the structure of language and of event perception. As adults, we implicitly identify discrete events from a scene of complex and even ambiguous interactions among objects. Further, we verbally characterize these events in remarkably consistent ways, relating our cognitive representations of events to our linguistic representations of events. The difficulty in this process is that while the world of conceivable events may be fairly unconstrained, language itself is a highly constrained format for representing events. How then, do infants acquiring language learn to map the less constrained world onto highly constrained linguistic structures? Scherff and Perfetti will investigate infant event perception and the acquisition of verb argument structure in preverbal infants (10-12 months) and infants just beginning to produce word combinations (18-20 months). Their project focuses on whether infants' conceptually categorize events based on the number of obligatory participants, an operation that might be critical for acquiring verbs with different argument structure. Using methods sensitive to a child's perception of novel events, Scherff and Perfetti will examine how infants' knowledge of event structures correspond to linguistic argument structures. They will also examine the underlying contributions of perceptual and cognitive mechanisms to infants' event representations and how language acquisition impacts infant event knowledge. By recording electrical potentials at the scalp, the investigators gain a rough idea of where in the infant brain perceived events structures are represented. This combination of methodologies and research questions can uniquely inform our understanding of how infants form bridges between their cognitive representations of events and the language acquisition process. This work will increase knowledge about how the cognitive and language functions of humans develop in the very early stages of life.