Psychology Commons^™

Does Making Something Move Matter? Representations Of Goals And Sources In Motion Events With Causal Sources, Laura Lakusta, Paul Muentener, Lauren Petrillo, Noelle Mullanaphy, Lauren Muniz

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Previous studies have shown a robust bias to express the goal path over the source path when describing events (“the bird flew into the pitcher,” rather than “… out of the bucket into the pitcher”). Motivated by linguistic theory, this study manipulated the causal structure of events (specifically, making the source cause the motion of the figure) and measured the extent to which adults and 3.5- to 4-year-old English-speaking children included the goal and source in their descriptions. We found that both children's and adults’ encoding of the source increased for events in which the source caused the motion of …