Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Verbs may refer to the means (I bumped into the lamp) or outcome (I broke the lamp) of an action (cf. Rappaport Hovav & Levin, 2010; Talmy, 1985). Do young children expect language to encode this distinction? Children’s imitation patterns suggest that they analyze nonlinguistic events in these terms. When a head-touch is the simplest action available, toddlers include just the outcome, not the means, in their own imitation (Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002). We ask whether syntax influences this inference. An experimenter with her hands occupied made a toy activate with a headtouch, using either Means-focused (I’m daxing to my toy) or Outcome-focused language (I’m daxing my toy). Toddlers then imitated the action. Means- but not Outcome-focus language encouraged children to include the distinctive headtouch, overriding the standard ‘rational imitation’ effect. This suggests that toddlers’ knowledge of argument structure includes an understanding of a means/outcome divide in verb meaning.