The effects of language on children's understanding of agency and causation.

During young children's developmental process, language-specific characteristics of structure, systems of meaning, and rules of language use may affect the direction of development of both their native language and their cognition. The present study looks at how differences in language structure translate into differences in performance on cognitive tasks and differences in the ways we attend and reason about events and objects in our environment on occasions of language production and interpretation. The main thesis of this dissertation is that differences in the ways the English and Spanish languages do not mark or mark, respectively, verbs of change of state (CS), change of position (CP), change of location (CL), and movement (MV), translate into differences in the aspects of events that speakers of these languages attend to, influencing children's cognitive preferences in tasks designed to test for their understanding of agency and causation, in linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. Linguistic analyses of these verbs suggest that English speakers should prefer to attend to the agents of actions causing events whereas Spanish speakers should prefer to attend to the end results of those events. Four-year-old English and Spanish speakers were given a storytelling task and a forced choice selection task followed by a narrative task to test for their cognitive preferences in both linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. Their performance showed that, overall, differences in language structure influence the ways speakers interpret and talk about events described by the verbs of CS, CP, CL, and MV. In addition, the use of these verbs has an effect on children's performance in cognitive tasks, with English speakers preferring to attend to the agents of events and Spanish speakers preferring to attend to the end result of events. Nonetheless, the effect of language structure is moderated by variables such as the type of verb, type of entity involved in the event, type of event, type of stimulus, and level of cognitive and grammatical development of the subject.PhDCognitive psychologyDevelopmental psychologyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLinguisticsPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132834/2/9990936.pd