How similar are objects and events?

Semanticists often assume an ontology for natural language that includes not only ordinary objects, but also events, and other sorts of entities. We link this ontology to how speakers represent static and dynamic entities. Specifically, we test how speakers determine whether an entity counts as “atomic” by using count vs. mass (e.g., some gleebs, some gleeb) and distributive vs. non-distributive descriptions (e.g., gleeb every second or so, gleeb around a little). We then seek evidence for atomic representation in a non-linguistic task. Ultimately we suggest that natural language ontology reveals properties of language-independent conceptualization

Language: Life without Numbers

AbstractIf your language did not have words for numbers, would you be able to think about numeric quantities? An Amazonian culture where number words are limited to one, two and many has provided new insights to the interaction between thought and language

Language Acquisition: When Does the Learning Begin?

Language acquisition is quite sophisticated by four months of age. Two cues that babies use to discriminate their language from another are the stress patterns of words and visual cues inherent in language production

Core knowledge

Core knowledge is a psychological theory that addresses age-old questions of what capacities are present from birth (therefore a product of evolution) and what capacities are acquired through experience. The central focus of this approach is whether uniquely human capacities are evident early in development or whether the differences between human abilities and those of other species emerge later in development

Divisions of the physical world : concepts of objects and substances

Our concepts of the physical world distinguish objects, such as chairs, from substances, such as quantities of wood, that constitute them. A particular chair might consist of a single chunk of wood, yet we think about the chair and the wood in different ways. For example, part of the wood is still wood, but part of the chair is not a chair. In this article we examine the basis of the object/substance distinction. We draw together for the first time relevant experiments widely dispersed in the cognitive literature, and view these findings in the light of theories in linguistics and metaphysics. We outline a framework for the difference between objects and substances, based on earlier ideas about form and matter, describing the psychological evidence surrounding it. The framework suggests that concepts of objects include a relation of unity and organization governing their parts, whereas concepts of substances do not. We propose, as a novel twist on this framework, that unity and organization for objects is a function of causal forces that shape the objects. In agreement with this idea, results on the identification of an item as an object depend on clues about the presence of the shaping relation, clues provided by solidity, repetition of shape, and other factors. We also look at results from human infants about the source of the object/substance distinction and conclude that the data support an early origin for both object and substance knowledge

Concepts of objects and substances in language

People distinguish objects from the substances that constitute them. Many languages also distinguish count nouns and mass nouns. What is the relation between these two distinctions? The connection between them is complicated by the facts that (a) some mass nouns (e.g., toast) seem to name countable objects; (b) some count and mass nouns (e.g., pots and pottery) seem to name the same objects; (c) nouns for seemingly the same things can be count in one language (English: dishes) but mass in another (French: la vaisselle); (d) count nouns can be used to name substances (There is carrot in the soup) and mass nouns to name portions (She drank three whiskeys); and (e) some languages (e.g., Mandarin) appear to have no count nouns, whereas others (e.g., Yudja) appear to have no mass nouns. All these cases counter a simple object-to-count-noun and substance-to-mass-noun relation, but they provide opportunities to see whether the grammatical distinction affects the referential one. We examine evidence from such cases and find continuity through development: Infants appear to have the conceptual OBJECT/ SUBSTANCE distinction very early on. Although this distinction may change with development, the acquisition of count/mass syntax does not appear to be an effective factor for change

Five-month-old infants have expectations for the accumulation of nonsolid substances

Infants fail to represent quantities of non-cohesive substances in paradigms where they succeed with solid objects. Some investigators have interpreted these results as evidence that infants do not yet have representations for substances. More recent research, however, shows that 5-month-old infants expect objects and substances to behave and interact in different ways. In the present experiments, we test whether infants have expectations for substances when the outcomes are not simply the opposite of those for objects. In Experiment 1, we find that 5- month-old infants expect that when a cup of sand pours behind a screen, it will accumulate in just one pile rather than two. Similarly, infants expect that when two cups of sand pour in separate streams, two distinct piles will accumulate rather than one. Infants look significantly longer at outcomes with an inconsistent number of piles, providing evidence that infants have expectations for how sand accumulates. To test whether the number of cups or the number of pours guided expectations about accumulation, Experiment 2 placed these cues in conflict. This resulted in chance performance, suggesting that, for infants to build expectations about these outcomes, they need both cues (cup and pour) to converge. These findings offer insight into the nature of infants’ representations for non-cohesive substances like sand

The object : substance :: event : process analogy

Linguists say that sentences are about events. Philosophers debate the metaphysics of event identity. Cognitive scientists posit event concepts to explain how creatures like us represent and reason about the world, and developmental psychologists ask how we come to have those concepts. But do we mean the same thing by ‘event’ (Casati and Varzi 2008; cf. Goldman 2007)? Our project aims to shed light on this question, in part, by studying the relationship between event semantics and event representations in the psychologist’s sense. Broadly, it explores the thesis that the semantic structure of event quantification, originally introduced into the literature with a metaphysical interpretation (Davidson 1967), reveals properties of how the mind structures its experience of the world. We investigate how language and representation relate in the event domain by following the lead of other semanticists and psychologists in analogizing to the object domain. Semantically, the referential properties of mass nouns like water, count nouns like cup, and plural noun phrases like cups are identifiable by demonstrating different combinations of cumulative, divisive, atomic, or plural reference (for early discussion, see Quine 1960, Cheng 1973, Cartwright 1975, Massey 1976, Burge 1977, Bunt 1979, 1985, Link 1983, Krifka 1989). Often, these combinations are understood to reflect real-world ontology: nouns that refer like water apply to substances, while cup applies to objects, and cups to pluralities of objects (Parsons 1979, Link 1983, Champollion 2010, among many others). Observing seemingly parallel referential properties in the verbal domain (Taylor 1977, Bach 1986a), many have adopted a parallel theory: verb phrases like sleep apply to processes or activities, while ‘once-only’ die applies to events, and jump (again and again) applies to pluralities of events. We aim to understand these properties in representational, rather than strict ontological terms