Events and Objects in Mind and Language

Humans are surprisingly adept at interpreting what is happening around them, even from a single glance. Beginning at infancy, we are able to recognize dynamic events, the roles that various entities play in these events and the temporal and causal components that make up events. Furthermore, we use language to describe the events that we experience. Despite the central role of events in the mind, the study of events within cognitive science has until recently remained fragmented. In this talk, I combine psycholinguistic, developmental and cross-linguistic approaches to address a series of key questions about the nature of events: What do we represent when we represent an event? How do such representations make contact with language in both novice (child) and experienced (adult) communicators? Does cross-linguistic variation in how events are encoded affect the way we think about events in the world? Our findings show that abstract properties of event structure are quite similar to those of object structure: such properties underlie both the conceptual and the linguistic encoding of event structure. Furthermore, the way learners acquire event language supports the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and non-linguistic event architecture. Finally, children and adults from different linguistic communities often represent and remember events in similar ways, despite cross-linguistic variation in how events are encoded.  Together, these results highlight novel connections between abstract event structure in language and cognition and bear on broad theories about how thought is related to language.

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