Developing accurate models of word meaning requires good empirical evidence about what words mean. I investigate how English verbs encode relationships between event participants, focusing on how verbs encode instruments (e.g., does slice specify that a tool must be used for slicing?). I compared two commonly used indices of verb meaning: linguistic judgments and sentence completions. Although these two indices were moderately correlated for a small sample of verbs, they were only weakly correlated when a larger sample of verbs was tested. These results indicate that the particular context of a task can strongly influence how meaning affects behavior. Dominant models of verb meaning fail to fully account for the results (either a logical entailment model or a cue-based model).

We asked whether categories expressed through lists of salient exemplars (e.g., car, truck, boat, etc.) convey the same meaning as categories expressed through conventional superordinate nouns (e.g., vehicles). We asked English speakers to list category members, with one group given superordinate labels like vehicles and the other group given only a list of salient exemplars. We found that the responses of the group given labels were more related, more typical, and less diverse than the responses of the group given exemplars. This result suggests that when people do not see a superordinate label, the categories that they infer are less well aligned across participants. In addition, categories inferred based on exemplars may be broader in general than categories given by superordinate labels.

Thematic roles such as Agent and Instrument have a long- standing place in theories of event representation. Nonetheless, the structure of these categories has been difficult to determine. We investigated how instrumental events, such as someone slicing bread with a knife, are categorized in English. Speakers described a variety of typical and atypical instrumental events, and we determined the similarity structure of their descriptions using correspondence analysis. We found that events where the instrument is an extension of an intentional agent were most likely to elicit similar language, highlighting the importance of agency in structuring instrumental categories.

Adults represent events in terms of abstract participant roles (e.g., when Edith eats chocolate, Edith is an agent and thechocolate is a patient) (Rissman & Majid, 2019). English, however, lacks commonly-known labels for these roles, whichmay make the distinction less accessible to people. We presented 42 English-speakers with 24 pictures of an agent actingon a patient (e.g., one person kicking another). A red dot marked the agent in half the pictures and marked the patientin the other half. We asked participants to sort the pictures into two piles using whatever criteria they liked. After threeopportunities to sort the pictures, only 55% of participants sorted into agent/patient piles. When the remaining 45% weregiven the agent/patient piles, only half were able to explain the basis for the sort. This suggests a disconnect betweenthe robustness of agent/patient categories in implicit processing and the availability of this seemingly basic distinction toexplicit reasoning.

Adults represent events through abstract roles: e.g., when Jim eats chocolate, Jim is an “Agent” and the chocolate a “Patient.” These roles are thought to be universally prominent across languages (Strickland, 2016). Nonetheless, learning to sort pictures into Agent and Patient categories is difficult for some individuals (Rissman & Lupyan, 2022). Which contexts affect the accessibility of these roles to explicit reasoning? Across two pre-registered experiments, English-speaking adults viewed pictures of an Agent acting on a Patient (e.g., one person kicking another). In each picture, a red dot marked either the Agent or the Patient. In one condition, participants freely sorted the pictures into two categories. In another condition, the pictures were accompanied by a nonsense verb marked with the suffix -ja or -ka. In both experiments, participants in the language condition were significantly more likely to sort by the Agent/Patient distinction, suggesting that language makes abstract roles more accessible.

Verbs are widely analyzed as functions taking a discrete number of arguments (e.g., drink has two arguments but give has three). Recent studies, however, suggest that English verbs encode Instruments as more or less salient (e.g., the Instrument is more salient for slice, less salient for eat). We conducted a judgment task with adult speakers of Spanish and Mandarin and found that verbs in these languages also encode Instruments as having a relative degree of salience, inconsistent with the discrete model of participant encoding.

Perceptual aspects of events, such as the visual prominence of event participants, have been shown to influence how people describe events. We investigate the relationship between such perceptual effects and patterns of eyegaze, focusing on a little- explored perceptual manipulation: the extent to which an event participant is wholly or partially visible. Using an eyetracking method, we found a correlation between this perceptual contrast and patterns of eyegaze at the beginning of the event but not the end. This finding supports the view that early visual attention to events has important downstream consequences for event conceptualization and linguistic description.

Studies have claimed that blind people’s spatial representations are different from sighted people, and blind people display superior auditory processing. Due to the nature of auditory and haptic information, it has been proposed that blind people have spatial representations that are more sequential than sighted people. Even the temporary loss of sight—such as through blindfolding—can affect spatial representations, but not much research has been done on this topic. We compared blindfolded and sighted people’s linguistic spatial expressions and non- linguistic localization accuracy to test how blindfolding affects the representation of path in auditory motion events. We found that blindfolded people were as good as sighted people when localizing simple sounds, but they outperformed sighted people when localizing auditory motion events. Blindfolded people’s path related speech also included more sequential, and less holistic elements. Our results indicate that even temporary loss of sight influences spatial representations of auditory motion events.

In both gesture and sign, objects and events can be represented by reproducing some of their features iconically.Iconic gestures do not typically appear until well into children’s second year of life, suggesting that the cognitive and/or com-municative resources required are not trivial. Here we investigate how manual iconicity develops in two different communica-tive systems. Using longitudinal video corpora, we compare the emergence of manual iconicity in 52 hearing children learninga spoken language (co-speech gesture) to a deaf child creating a manual communication system (homesign). We focus on theshape of the hand, asking how handshape use changes between age 1 and 5, and how handshape choice relates to semanticcontent. We find broadly similar patterns of handshape development in co-speech gesture and homesign. This suggests that thecognitive building blocks underlying children’s ability to iconically map forms to meanings are shared across vastly differentcommunicative systems.