Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A central question in cognitive science is whether language merely expresses pre-existing concepts or provides new forms of conceptual representation. Some recent studies suggest that representing generic two-participant relations (dogs chase birds) requires linguistic encoding, in contrast to specific events (this dog chased this bird) or one-participant generic relations (dogs jump). We explored whether 17- to 21-month-olds, who do not yet systematically produce transitive sentences, can represent generic two-participant events. Children (n-28) completed an imitation task with either one-participant events or two-participant events. Toddlers reliably reproduced the observed action and generalized role assignments to novel exemplars (new dogs and birds), performing above chance in the two-participant condition. These results suggest that toddlers can represent transitive event relations prior to the productive mastery of transitive constructions, constraining strong claims that linguistic production is necessary for forming such representations.