Shanju Lin Amanda J. Owen Van Horne Dept of Communication Sciences and Disorders & DeLTA Center The University o

1. Perceiving and encoding motion events in children of English and Mandarin Shanju Lin Amanda J. Owen Van Horne Dept of Communication Sciences and Disorders & DeLTA Center The University of Iowa Introduction • Motion events • One object moves with respect to another object. Talmy, 1975, 1985 • Learning a language influences cognitive development by providing a representational resource. Clark, 2004 • Cognition and Language in Motion Events • Salience Hypothesis: Learning a language permanently changes cognitive • attention to spatial distinctions. Bowerman & Choi, 2003, Slobin, 2004, Clark, 2004 • Underspecification Hypothesis: Cognition is only transiently affected by • language specific patterns; Once it is nonlinguistic in nature performance • is not affected by language specific information • Gennari et al., 2002, Papafragouet al., 2002, Papafragou & Selimis, 2010 • Cognition and language in motion events are early developed. • 18 months olds detect object, trajectory, and the whole motion. • Raskin& Poulin-Dubois, 2002 • Language-specific expressions in spatial language early • Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Berman & Slobin, 1994 General Methods • Nonlinguistic Categorization Task: • Which of two alternative videos goes with the baseline video • Linguistic Description Task: Describe the 24 baseline videos • Coding: 1) How many elements did the speaker mention? • 2) Which elements did the speaker mention? • He went from the ferris wheel under the rollercoaster to the drinks – 3 items S, P, G • The lizard drives under the tracks – 2 items, M & P • He was driving – 1 item, M • The lizard went to a bottle– 1 item, G • Tasks adapted from Papafragou et al. (2002) & Gennari et al. (2002) • 24 triads of videos: Each triad has one baseline and two alternative variants. • Differ minimally on Manner, Path, Source, or Goal. • Manners: Minimal pairs constructed within category • Nonvehicle: jump, walk, roll • Vehicle: drive car, ride motorcycle, fly airplane • Paths: through, under, over • Sources & Goals: 2 of each present in each • baseline. Minimal pairs switched locations, not items. Baseline Manner Change Goal Change

2. Cross-linguistic Comparison: English & Mandarin • Linguistic Typology Talmy (1991), Slobin (2004) 1. Verb-framed languages: Spanish, Italian, Greek • La mina ENTRO a la casa CORRIENDO(Spanish) ‘The girl entered the house running’ 2. Satellite-framed languages: English, German • The girl RANINTO the house • 3. Equipollently-framed languages: Mandarin, Thai • Nuhei PAO JIN CHU fangzi li. ‘Girl run enter go house inside’. (Mandarin) • Mandarin-speaking children rely mainly on this serial verb construction when encoding motion events. Lin, 2006 • Q1: Does linguistic encoding affect cognitive perception in complex motion • events? • Q2: Do Mandarin speakers encode motion events differently from English • speakers when those events are less likely to be described in the • Mandarin canonical construction? • Participants • Results • Categorization Children tend to notice source more than adults in both languages No other differences apparent Grand: X2 (9, 65)= 20.66, p< .001, S < M = P = G Age: X2 (3, 65)= 16.74, p< .001, Source: Adults < TD4 Language: X2 (3, 65)= 2.41, p> .05 Production • Adults mention 3-4 elements per response. • Similar elements regardless of language • Children mention between 1 & 2 elements. • Language specific differences are observed. • English speaking kids are more path oriented • Mandarin speaking kids are more goal oriented Group: F(3, 62)= 53.179, p<.0001, Adults > TD4 Encoded Elements: F(3, 62), p<.0001, M > P > S, G > S Group * Encoded Element: F(9, 62)= 6.891, p<.0001 Path: E-TD4 > M-TD4 Goal: M-TD4> E-TD4 Group: F(3, 62) = 53.188, p < .0001, Adults > TD4, E-TD4 = M-TD4, E-Adults = M-Adults • Conclusion • English and Mandarin adults encoded motion events similarly in both tasks and included more elements than children. • English and Mandarin speaking kids perceive these events similarly • Mandarin kids encoded path less than English kids • Our events do not easily lend themselves to serial verb constructions in Mandarin • Reduced reliance on typical constructions may have affected results

3. Within Language Comparison: Children with SLI & typically developing 4 year olds Categorization Task & Attentional Biases Do children with SLI notice the same things within the scene as TD children? Children with SLI tend to focus on change of state rather than motion events Kelly & Rice, 1994 Production Task Given that children with SLI have a shorter MLU, what will they omit? Omit Manner: Heavy reliance on GAP verbs (e.g., go, do) Rice & Bode, 1993 but see also Thordardottir & Ellis Weismer, 2001 Omit Source, Goal, Path: Tend to omit optional arguments Ingham, Fletcher, Schelletter, & Sinka, 1998; Johnston & Kamhi, 1984; King, 1996, Thordardottir & Ellis Weismer, 2002 Participants Results Categorization Production • All children fail to notice Source changes or consider them irrelevant • Differences in attention to Goal is primary source of group differences • SLI children have a tendency to ignore other changes if Goal changes • TD children notice Manner & Path changes more often Chi-squared test for different independent groups SLI vs TD – All Elements Χ2 (3) = 9.26, p=.02 SLI vs TD Without Goal: Χ2(2) = 3.9, p=.16 • SLI & TD4 talk both tend to mention between • 1 & 2 elements • SLI group show a strong Goal Bias • The turtle went to the present • The giraffe got to the corn • The chicken wented to the swingset • The ant goed to the truck • TD4 group show a strong Manner Bias • A hippo was driving a car • A pig was flying • A fox riding in a jet over a rainbow • The deer jumped over the fence Manner t(24)=3.41, p=.002 Goal t(24)=1.92, p=.06 Path t(24)=1.14, p=.26 Source t(24)=1.71 p=.10 t(24)=.44, p=.66 • Conclusion • Children with SLI differentially attend to Goal instead of Manner and (to a lesser extent) Source • Children with SLI rely heavily on GAP verbs, making it more likely that they mention goal • Cannot disambiguate attentional bias from verb use given categorization results • Groups are matched well in terms of amount of information included in the production task – differences are not due to production limitations. • Age-matched groups and more SLI children are required to validate the hypothesis that children with SLI attend to different elements/talk about different aspects of the event

4. Conclusions • Cognition and Language in Motion Events • Production & Categorization – Crosslinguistically • Cross-linguistic production related differences were not reflected in the categorization task. • Easier to see production differences in children - below ceiling performance • Need an intermediate age group to further explore language/ cognition interaction • Developmental changes in attention away from source • Adults attend less to source and all groups encode source less in production • Cross-linguistic differences in the production task but not the categorization task suggest that the changing attention to source is based on experience in the world, not language alone. • Production & Categorization -- Language Impairment • Children with SLI attend to and talk about different things compared to their TD peers. • - Following Kelly & Rice (1993, 1994), children with SLI may have different • attention biases, which change their verb learning profiles. • - Based on cross-linguistic results from the categorization task, we assume • no/limited covert linguistic encoding for the children. • Both Children with SLI and Mandarin TD 4 year olds showed some evidence of reliance on frequent constructions • Follow up studies using more common actions and/or novel verbs required to confirm this effect Works Cited Berman, R., & Slobin, D. I. (Eds.). (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguisticdevelopmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 387-427). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Choi, S., & Bowerman, M. (1991). Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns. Cognition, 41, 83-122.. Clark, E. V. (2004). How language acquisition builds on cognitive development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 472-478. Gennari, S., Sloman, S., Malt, B., & Fitch, W. (2002). Motion events in language and cognition. Cognition, 83, 49-79. Ingham, R., Fletcher, P., Schelleter, C., & Sinka, I. (1998). Resultative VPs and specific language impairment. Language Acquisition, 7, 87-111. Johnston, J. R., & Kamhi, A. G. (1984). Syntactic and semantic aspects of the utterances of language-impaired children: The same can be less. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly: Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(1), 65-85. Papafragou, A., Massey, C., & Gleitman, L. (2002). Shake, rattle, ‘n’ roll: The representation of motion in language and cognition. Cognition, 84, 189-219. Kelly, D. J. & Rice, M. L. (1993). Preferences for verb interpretation in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 37, 182-192. King, G. (1996). Verb complementation in language impaired school age children. In M. Aldridge (Ed.), Child language (pp. 84–91). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Lin, S. (2006). Encoding motion events: A study of Mandarin-speaking children. Unpublished MA thesis. National Taiwan University, Taipei. Papafragou, A., & Selimis, S. (2010). Event categorisation and language: A cross-linguistic study of motion. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(2), 224-260. Rakison, D. H. & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2002). You go this way and I’ll go that way: developmental changes in infant’s detection of correlation among static and dynamic features in motion events. Child Development, 73, 682-699. Rice, M. L., & Bode, J. V. (1993). GAPS in the verb lexicons of children with specific language impairment. First Language, 13, 113-131. Slobin, D. I. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In S. Stro¨mqvist & L. Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives (pp. 219-257). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Talmy, L. (1975). Semantics and syntax of motion. In J. P. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. IV, pp. 181-238). New York: Academic Press. Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description. Vol. III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon (pp. 57-149). New York: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, L., (1991). Path to realization: A typology of event conflation. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 17, 480-519. Thordardottir, E. T., & Ellis Weismer, S. (2001). High-frequency verbs and verb diversity in the spontaneous speech of school-age children with specific language impairment. International Journal of Language Communication Disorders, 36, 221-244. Thordardottir, E. T., & Ellis Weismer, S. (2002). Verb argument structure weakness in specific language impairment in relation to age and utterance length. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 16, 233-250. Acknowledgements We would thank Karla McGregor, Bob McMurray, Word learning Lab and MACLab at the University of Iowa for help and comments on the experimental design and stimuli. We also thank Hintat Cheung, Lindsey Hansen, Allison Haskill, Elizabeth Lipton, Grantwood AEA, SungMeiPrechoolfor all the help with this project, and the members of Grammar Acquisition Lab at University of Iowa for data collection. This project is funded by a Pre-doctoral Scholarship from Ministry of Education, Taiwan awarded to ShanjuLin, and a University of Iowa Internal Funding Initiative awarded to Amanda J. Owen Van Horne. Contacts:shan-ju-lin@uiowa.edu, amanda-owen@uiowa.edu