Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Verbs are central to the syntactic structure of sentences. Children can compare multiple events during verb learning, andthis comparison can help them learn and extend new verbs (e.g., Haryu, Imai & Okada, 2011). To test whether adults use asimilar comparison process, a Tobii x30 eye tracker recorded adults’ eye movements while they watched dynamic sceneswith novel events, and heard new verbs. Some scenes were relevant to the new verb and some were not. We predictedthat as adults compared events, they could deduce over trials that some events were irrelevant, and reduce their visualattention to them. Results show that when learning trials started with a relevant event, adults did look longer at relevantvs. irrelevant events. However, when the first learning trial was irrelevant, they looked equally at the events. The studywill be discussed in relation to current theories of verb acquisition.