Across languages and event types (i.e., agentive and nonagentive motion, transfer, change of state, attach/detach), goal paths are privileged over source paths in the linguistic encoding of events. Furthermore, some linguistic analyses suggest that goal paths are more central than source paths in the semantic and syntactic structure of motion…

When we describe time, we often use the language of space ("The movie was long"; "The deadline is approaching"). Experiments 1-3 asked whether--as patterns in language suggest--a structural similarity between representations of spatial length and temporal duration is easier to access than one between length and other dimensions of experience, such…

In two experiments, 2.5-year-old children spontaneously used geometric information from 2D maps to locate objects in a 3D surface layout, without instruction or feedback. Children related maps to their corresponding layouts even though the maps differed from the layouts in size, mobility, orientation, dimensionality, and perspective, and even when…

Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a…

This study investigates children's ability to use language to guide their choice of individuation criterion in the domains of objects and events. Previous work (Shipley, E. F., & Shepperson, B. (1990). Countable entities: developmental changes. "Cognition," 34, 109-136.) has shown that children have a strong bias to use a spatio-temporal…

Four experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants use perceptual property information in a complex object individuation task, using the violation-of-expectancy looking time method (Xu, 2002; Xu & Carey, 1996). Infants were shown two objects with different properties emerge and return behind an occluder, one at a time. The occluder was…