The Notion of Source in Infants' Event Representations

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research investigates how infants represent events and how these initial representations may serve as a basis for what gets mapped into language. The specific aim of the proposed studies is to explore how infants conceptualize the Source (starting point of actor's movement; e.g., 'the branch' in 'the bird flew off the branch') in events. The questions explored are: Which types of Sources do infants encode, and do these [individual conceptualizations of Source fall under a broad abstract Source category (as suggested by evidence from language acquisition studies and linguistic theory)? Or, does an abstract category of Source emerge when children start learning the language of events? Visual habituation paradigms will be used with pre-linguistic infants to explore these questions. These studies will enrich our understanding of infant event representation in two important ways. First, it will further our understanding of which kinds of Sources preinguistic infants are able to track and encode when viewing an event (thus perhaps yielding a 'guideline' for [normal infant development). Second, it will inform us about how infants conceptualize Sources in events; i.e., nether infants form a broad, abstract conceptual category of Source as does language. [unreadable] [unreadable]