Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Japanese and American 13-15-month-old infants distinguish between crossing a bounded ground (e.g., a street)versus an unbounded ground (e.g., a field). In English, the same verb – crossing – expresses both types. While language hasbeen hypothesized to guide infants’ progression from language-general to language-specific event perception (G ̈oksun et al.,2011), no prior studies examined this hypothesis. We presented toddlers who no longer perceive this Japanese distinction inevents with novel spatial prepositions (N = 24) or nonlinguistic tones (N = 12) to label bounded versus unbounded grounds.Children presented with labels, but not tones, attended to the differences in ground categories by looking significantly longer tothe novel ground type at test. This suggests that above and beyond the attention-getting function associated with non-linguisticauditory stimuli, language uniquely facilitates categorization of event components.