Conceptual Foundations of Spatial Language: Evidence for a Goal Bias in Infants

Abstract

We explored the pre-linguistic foundations of spatial language by testing how 12‐month-old infants represent sources and goals in Motion events (e.g., a duck moving out of a bowl and onto a block). Abundant evidence suggests that sources and goals are represented asymmetrically in languages, with goals taking a more prominent role than sources. We asked whether infants encode goals and sources as separate components of Motion events (Experiment 1) and whether they show asymmetric encoding of source and goal when they are part of the same Motion event (Experiment 2). Results showed that infants encode both goals and sources in separate events, but, when both are present, they encode goals in preference to sources. This Source-Goal asymmetry in infants' pre-linguistic representations of Motion events suggests a structure homologous to that found in language. The homology could provide the non-linguistic support for learning the language of events.