Infant event representations and the acquisition of verb argument structure

All prominent theories of language acquisition assume that preverbal can be used to "bootstrap" acquisition of nouns and verbs. These studies investigated whether infants formulate conceptual event representations that encode the core features of verbs, the linguistic representations of events, including (1) the number of essential participants in an event and (2) the semantic organization among the essential participants in an event. 11--13- and 18--20-month-old infants were tested in a familiarization looking time paradigm in which they observed motion events involving three objects. In some events all three observable objects were essential participants, as in an event of Giving. In other events, only two of the three observable objects were essential participants, as in the events of Hugging and Touching. Once familiarized, infants observed a new event that represented either, (1) meaningless perceptual changes, (2) a meaningful change in the number of essential participants, and/or (3) a meaningful change in the semantic roles of the essential participants. Consistent with predictions, both 11--13- and 18--20-month-olds demonstrated a selective interest in new events that represented meaningful changes. Infants tended to look longer at events that represented changes in both the number of essential participants and in the semantic relationship among the participants. These studies also found an association between developing verb knowledge and infants' event discriminations. Verb comprehension skills were related to stronger discriminations between events even in the younger infants. Enhanced verb production skills were not consistently associated with infants' event discriminations. Verb productive skills were only predictive of 18--20-month-olds' categorical distinctions between events, suggesting that 18--20-month-olds' event representations may be more closely linked with their emerging linguistic representations of events. Together these findings suggest that prior to their ability to verbally describe events, infants form representations of events that encode the core features of linguistic representations of events. These findings provide strong evidence to support the core assumption of the Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis.