Language-Related Motion Event Similarities in English- and Spanish-Speaking Children

The relation between thought and language was explored using 2 experiments testing monolingual Spanish- and English-speaking children's responses to visual motion event stimuli. In a match-to-sample task (Experiment 1) 7-year-old English speakers fixated on videos matching the manner (rather than path) of a target video more often than Spanish-speaking 7-year-olds and both 3.5-year-old groups. In Experiment 2 the same children viewed novel motion events paired with audio descriptions containing a novel verb. These descriptions syntactically implied that the verb referred to either manner or path. Children then fixated on the video matching the novel verb. Although all children fixated on manner more often in the manner condition, an interaction effect showed that only 7-year-olds were biased by lexical tendencies in verb learning. These results suggest that some nonlinguistic thought may be linked to, among other things, linguistic structure.