Development of Event Segmentation in Language and Cognition: Evidence From Dwell Times and Eye Movements

To navigate in and communicate about the continuous world we experience, our minds segment this experience into discrete event units. Yet, languages differ in how they package core aspects of events into linguistic units. Here, we ask how event units in language and cognition relate to each other, and how this relation might change during language acquisition. To do so, we focus on motion events and compare child and adult speakers of Turkish-a verb-framed language encoding motion events in multiple linguistic units with distinct units for each path segment. In a linguistic task, there were systematic differences in the number of linguistic units used for expressing motion paths when describing events with versus without direction changes in adults and to a lesser extent in 5-year-olds but not in 4-year-olds. In a non-linguistic eye-tracked dwell-time task, both children and adults had similar visual attention profiles for events with and without direction changes. These findings indicate that although linguistic event units become increasingly language-specific with age, cognitive event units remain stable and independent of linguistic encoding. These findings show that people flexibly shift between different levels of granularity when segmenting events in language and cognition. Further, this flexibility seems to emerge in children as young as 4 to 5 years old.