How the perception of events in children is influenced by language

Abstract

Perceptual attunement occurs in a number of areas in infants' lives, preparing them to be members of their culture. Infants begin with the ability to discriminate between a wide range of distinctions found in all cultures, such as speech sounds, face perception, and tonal scales in music. Over time, infants' discrimination abilities become gradually aligned with those distinctions supported by their language and culture. At the same time, sensitivity to distinctions not supported in the ambient environment become attenuated. Here, we review the literature on perceptual attunement and propose a new domain which may undergo a similar process: the perception of motion events. For example, there is evidence that infants learning Japanese continue to attend to the grounds over which events occur (i.e., unbounded versus bounded, as in a field versus a road, respectively), while infants learning English attend less to grounds by 23 months of age. This process, which we refer to as semantic attunement, is somewhat analogous to the properties of phonological attunement, an area that has been extensively studied. We conclude by suggesting future research in this area.