Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has suggested the presence of a cognitive goal bias, which favors the linguistic and non-linguistic (mnemonic) encoding of goals of motion over sources. The present corpus-based study tests the limits of the goal bias by comparing the path-encoding tendencies of English come and go in young children’s and adults’ naturalistic speech. Both verbs can occur with source and goal adjuncts; however, they differ in their presuppositional structure, such that come presupposes a goal while go presupposes a source. This difference in presupposition might lead adult speakers to inhibit goal-encoding for come via the Gricean maxim of quantity. As input, this might lead young children to acquire different path structures for go and come, even before they have mastered conversational-pragmatic abilities. Descriptive statistics replicate earlier findings of a general goal bias for both verbs. However, the results of more detailed regression analyses suggest that go exhibits a stronger goal bias than come for children and adults. Moreover, children from ages 2- 3 persist in inhibiting goal mentioning for come at rates similar to adult usage. This effect holds even while goal expressions for go are becoming more complex. These findings suggest that statistical patterns in the input can override non-linguistic biases, even during early lexical acquisition.