Event knowledge vs. verb knowledge

Two kinds of knowledge are often confounded: knowledge about events occurring in the physical world, and knowledge about words occurring in language. We present two studies designed to show that these are distinct, that this distinction is important, and that it is difficult to determine which kind of knowledge is responsible for certain behaviors. In Study 1, we show that priming from verbs to nouns is both capable of and perhaps best explained by knowledge from distributions of word use rather than distributions of experiential knowledge of events. In Study 2, we show that differences in the scope of generalizations one might make, based on distributional statistics in language, can allow us to make testable predictions about whether the source of the knowledge is language-based or experience-based. This often-overlooked difference between experiential knowledge and word knowledge is important for developing a theory about how all knowledge is structured and used