Jeffrey Lidz
Professor and Chair, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
jlidz@umd.edu
1413 Marie Mount Hall
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Research Expertise
Language Acquisition
Psycholinguistics
Syntax
Publications
Visual perception supports 4-place event representations: A case study of TRADING
Can adults visually represent a trading as a single event with four participants?
Contributor(s): Jeffrey LidzNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Ekaterina Khylstova (UCLA), Laurel Perkins (UCLA)
Events of social exchange, such as givings and tradings, are uniquely prevalent in human societies and cognitively privileged even at early stages of development. Such events may be represented as having 3 or even 4 participants. To do so in visual working memory would be at the limit of the system, which throughout development can track only 3 to 4 items. Using a case study of trading, we ask (i) whether adults can track all four participants in a trading scene, and (ii) whether they do so by chunking the scene into two giving events, each with 3 participants, to avoid placing the visual working memory system at its limit. We find that adults represent this scene under a 4-participant concept, and do not view the trade as two sequential giving events. We discuss further implications for event perception and verb learning in development.
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