{"pk":25570,"title":"2-year-olds use syntax to infer actor intentions in a rational-action paradigm","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Verbs may refer to the means (I bumped into the lamp) or\noutcome (I broke the lamp) of an action (cf. Rappaport Hovav\n& Levin, 2010; Talmy, 1985). Do young children expect\nlanguage to encode this distinction? Children’s imitation\npatterns suggest that they analyze nonlinguistic events in\nthese terms. When a head-touch is the simplest action\navailable, toddlers include just the outcome, not the means, in\ntheir own imitation (Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002). We\nask whether syntax influences this inference. An experimenter\nwith her hands occupied made a toy activate with a headtouch,\nusing either Means-focused (I’m daxing to my toy) or\nOutcome-focused language (I’m daxing my toy). Toddlers\nthen imitated the action. Means- but not Outcome-focus\nlanguage encouraged children to include the distinctive headtouch,\noverriding the standard ‘rational imitation’ effect. This\nsuggests that toddlers’ knowledge of argument structure\nincludes an understanding of a means/outcome divide in verb\nmeaning.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"agents"},{"word":"goals"},{"word":"event perception"},{"word":"development"},{"word":"argument structure"},{"word":"verb meaning"},{"word":"imitation"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0f53h1v3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Melissa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kline","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Jesse","middle_name":"","last_name":"Snedeker","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25570/galley/15194/download/"}]}