Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The semantic property of boundedness characterizes the presence of well-defined spatio-temporal boundaries for eventsor objects in language (Bach, 1986; Frawly, 1992; Jackendoff, 1991). Little research has tested whether this propertyactually characterizes event and object cognition (but see Wellwood, Hespos, & Rips, 2018). We showed participantsvideos of bounded events where a salient change in state of the affected object(s) occurred (e.g., dressing a teddy bear)and unbounded events that lacked a salient change (e.g., waving a handkerchief). Participants decided whether a videomatched with a picture of a single novel object or a picture of a novel substance (object/substance pictures were adoptedfrom Li, Dunham, & Carey, (2009)). Participants tended to pair a bounded event with an object and an unbounded eventwith a substance, and were in fact better at establishing the former connection. We conclude that boundedness underliesthe cognitive representation of both events and objects.