Assessing event perception in adults and prelinguistic children: A prelude to syntactic bootstrapping

The verb-learning theory Participant-Argument-Match (PAM) holds that children assume each participant in a described event is expressed as an argument NP. Our Exp.1 shows that infants distinguish participants from bystanders in “giving” and “hugging” scenes (replicating Gordon 2003). Exp.2 demonstrates an implicit measure of this distinction with adults. Exp.3 shows that adults perceive instruments as participants, even though verbs naturally describing such scenes typically do not have arguments for them (e.g. “jimmy”). If Exp.3 predicts infants' construal of similar scenes, this poses a problem for PAM: represented event structures do not always align one-to-one with verb argument structures.