Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Entities in the spatial domain (objects) and the temporal domain (events) are characterized by parallel distinctions that are supported by a shared notion of individuation that runs across domains. This work investigates whether conceptual considerations of individuation are language-independent. We test speakers of English, which uses count-mass syntax and telicity to mark linguistic individuals in the nominal and verbal domain respectively, and Mandarin, which lacks these linguistic features. Our results throw light onto the nature of entity categories in the human mind: both English-speaking and Mandarin-speaking viewers process individuated and non-individuated entities differently, with only the former having a well-defined (temporal/spatial) structure with integrally-ordered, distinct parts. Crucially, these features of non-linguistic individuation are conceptualized in similar ways cross-linguistically and are potentially universal.