Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages vary in the ways they package the conceptual components of motion events into verbs. In a series of experiments, we examined the use of event-general conceptual categories of MANNER and RESULT during verb learning. We tested the accessibility of these concepts within and across domains of spontaneous motion and caused motion events, in speakers of typologically different languages (English and Spanish). Our results indicate that learners can adapt new lexicalization biases that may differ from those present in their own native language, and generalize them to novel instances of the same class of verbs. Furthermore, our data also indicate that under certain contexts, learners can transfer these newly learned biases to a different event domain, suggesting that event-general conceptual categories are psychologically available to learners.