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Updated: Mar 17, 2026

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task
Published on: June 1, 2015
Categorization of dynamic realistic motion events: Infants form categories of path before manner
Haruka Konishi1, Shannon M Pruden2, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff3
1Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48823, USA.
Abstract:
Acquiring verbs and prepositions requires categorization of spatial relations. This study examined whether a ground object differentially influences 13- to 15-month-old English-learning infants' categorization of a figure's path (e.g., around; Experiment 1) and manner (e.g., hopping; Experiment 2) of motion in non-linguistic dynamic realistic events. Furthermore, we tested whether categorizing path is "easier" than categorizing manner. Results revealed that infants categorized path only in the presence of a ground object, validating Talmy's definition of path. In contrast, infants categorized manner only in the absence of a ground object. Finally, infants categorizing path showed stronger novelty preferences than those categorizing manner, supporting a primacy of path. Infants showed sensitivity to event components lexicalized in relational terms.
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