Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study contrasts the learning of two different kinds of motion. The first of these we call extrinsic motion, or the motion of one object with respect to another, reference object. The second we call intrinsic motion, or the motion of an object or its parts expressed with respect to the object itself. An experiment tests for people's abilities to associate these two types of motion with nouns and verbs. Subjects were presented with animated events on a computer screen accompanied by sentences involving nouns and verbs. In the learning phase, each noun and verb was related to both an extrinsic motion attribute and an intrinsic motion attribute. Subjects were then tested by presenting them with pairs of events varying on only one of these attributes and asking them which event better exemplified the meaning of a particular noun or verb. The results of this experiment demonstrate a bias to associate verbs with extrinsic motion and to associate nouns with intrinsic motion. These results suggest a division of labor between noun and verb meanings, with verb meanings specialized to encode relational information, while noun meanings are specialized to encode information about objects in isolation.