[PS-2.12] How is infants' attention distributed between agent and patient in causal events?

Jackson, I. ¹ , Parise, E. ² , Reid, V. ² & Theakston, A. ¹

1 The University of Manchester
2 Lancaster University

By the end of the second year, infants demonstrate a bias for mapping the first noun in a sentence to the agent of a causal event. Younger infants in their first year also show a similar bias towards agents over patients in simple dynamic events, for example focussing on the chaser when one geometric shape appears to chase another. However, successful language acquisition relies on infants establishing mappings between concrete event components (e.g. thematic roles such as agent and patient) and the linguistic means of expressing them. Thus, infants must first learn to encode the roles and identities of both agent and patient, and the causal relations between them. In the current work we presented 30 English 13-month-old infants with animations of simple causal interactions between two participants. By systematically varying different components of the events we assessed infants' sensitivity to changes in the identity of agents and patients, the action performed by the agent, and reversals of the thematic roles of agent and patient. We will present eye tracking data to explore how attention is distributed between event participants in each instance, and discuss these results in the context of infants' developing sensitivity to linguistically relevant event cues.