Children's attention to the dimensions of manner and path of an event in a non-linguistic task
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Manner and path are two core components of motion events. Manner refers to how an entity moves (crawling, dancing), and path refers to the trajectory it follows relative to a reference object (into a box, around a pole). We will refer to more specific concepts, that can be grouped as manner or as path, as “basic-level concepts”. While manner and path are experienced holistically in the world, languages tend to segment them, often assigning each to a different lexical item. Languages differ in how they encode this segmentation: with satellite-framed languages encoding manner in the verb and path in a prepositional phrase and verb-framed languages encoding path in the verb and manner in a gerund (Talmy, 1985). Children and adults represent manner and path as distinct dimensions of motion events in language. Prior research has shown that children and adults are attuned to the linguistic differences (Naigles & Terrazas, 1998; Papafragou & Selimis, 2010). This bias is also flexible and can be overcome easily: Shafto et al. (2014) found that children quickly adjusted their interpretations of novel motion verbs when given examples that contradicted their language-specific biases, suggesting that both dimensions are conceptually available and can be deployed strategically when interpreting new input. However, we do not know much about the abstract concepts, or much about them outside a linguistic context. It remains unclear whether children can access and use these categories in the absence of external language input. Our study asks whether these concepts support behavior independently of linguistic framing or expectations. In the current study, we test 5.5- to 7.5-year-old children in a nonlinguistic forced-choice task designed to probe whether they can track and generalize motion patterns based on either manner or path without relying on words or labels. The paradigm is adapted from a previous adult study (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CMWAH), which showed that adults could succeed in the same task structure even when no linguistic input was provided. If children can likewise succeed, it would suggest that manner and path are easily accessible concepts available to guide categorization even in the absence of external language input. Support for this idea comes from work on emerging sign languages. In Nicaraguan Sign Language, for example, later cohorts of child signers introduced consistent segmentation of motion events into discrete components of manner and path, even though this structure was not present in the input they received (Senghas et al., 2004). In a similar vein, studies with infants have shown early sensitivity to changes in manner and path (e.g., Pulverman et al., 2013), suggesting that their development could start well before language. Such findings raise the possibility that children actively impose structure on continuous events in ways that could potentially reflect underlying conceptual primitives.
Institution: Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7154451147