1-166 - Who Done It?: Processing Causal Events for Language

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Understanding causality is fundamental to identifying and describing relations between objects, actions, and events that go on around us every day. While infants are adept at identifying causal relations in simple collision or state change events, little research examines the complexity of causal structure reflected in language. In this symposium, we move beyond infants reasoning about simple causal events to address two key questions: (1) What factors differentially affect children’s nonlinguistic and linguistic causal representations?; and (2) How do children learning different languages encode causal events in their descriptions? Bringing together different methodologies, ages, and languages, this symposium highlights links between infants’ processing of causal events and children’s descriptions of these relations.
The first paper builds on English-reared infants’ goal bias in dynamic events, asking whether this bias persists in the nonlinguistic encoding of both causal and non-causal events, and how preschoolers’ descriptions of similar events differ from their nonlinguistic representations. The second paper examines English-reared children’s evaluations of causal relations and force dynamics, which involve interactions between multiple causal agents, as in the relations of ‘help’ and ‘prevent’. How do preschoolers describe aspects of events to represent higher-order causal relations? The third paper investigates Turkish-reared preschoolers’ expressions of causal events in speech and gesture during spontaneous interactions. It examines how parental input and language-specific aspects of Turkish affect children’s use of caused motion in both modalities. Finally, our discussant integrates these findings and focuses on the implications of the relation between nonlinguistic and linguistic representations of causal events.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Tilbe Goksun, Koc University

Discussant

• Laura Wagner, Ohio State University

Individual Presentations

• The Influence of Causation on a Goal Bias Over Development - Presenting Author: Laura Lakusta, Montclair State University; Paul Muentener, Tufts Univ; Lauren Petrillo, Montclair State University; Noelle Mullanaphy, Rutgers University; Lauren Muniz, Montclair State University; Megan Sommers, Montclair State University; Inae Colucio, Montclair State University

• The Force of Language: How Children Acquire the Complex Categories of Force Dynamics - Presenting Author: Nathan George, Penn State University; Kathryn A Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University; Roberta M Golinkoff, University of Delaware

• Linguistic typology affects development of multimodal communication about caused motion: Evidence from Turkish toddler-mother talk - Presenting Author: Suleyman Tasci, Koc University; Reyhan Furman, University of Alberta; Asli Ozyurek, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Aylin C Küntay, Koc University