The relationship between language development and event processing: Lexical acquisition and attention to manner and path

The purpose of this project was to investigate infants' performance on one of the most fundamental cognitive skills for learning motion verbs---attending to manner and path in motion events. English- and Spanish-learning 14- to 17-month-olds and 7- to 9-month-olds participated in a series of experiments probing the development of the ability to treat manner and path as independent elements of events, and the relationship between attention to events and lexical acquisition. Participants were habituated to a computer-animated motion event with both a manner and a path, and then tested on four different types of events: (1) a control event identical to the habituation event; (2) an event with the same manner as the habituation event, but a different path; (3) an event with the same path as the habituation event, but a different manner; and (4) and event in which both the manner and path differed from those in all of the other events.; Results indicate that the basic ability to detect changes in manner and path between events is present preverbally, but that the more sophisticated ability to conceptualize manner and path as separable, independent elements of events develops between 7 and 17 months of age. Furthermore, how much attention novice word learners (14- to 17-month-olds) attend to manner appears to have differential consequences for lexical acquisition, depending on the frequency with which manner is expressed in one's native language.