Laura Wagner
Department of Psychology
The Ohio State University
How do children learn to map pre-linguistic concepts about events into language specific structures? This talk will consider children's early understanding of one event component -- telicity. I will discuss some recent results on pre-linguistic infants event representations and how these are consistent with the linguistic notion of telicity. In addition, this talk will examine how children break into the actual marking of telicity information in English. I will report on experiments showing children's early knowledge of telicity and their ability to use it in the service of individuating events. The youngest children tested (age 2;10) also demonstrated reliance on argument structure as a cue to telicity semantics, suggesting how children may bootstrap their way into this system.
Reception to follow in 1413 Marie Mount Hall.