Young children sometimes incorrectly interpret verbs that have a “result” meaning, such as understanding ‘fill’ to refer to adding liquid to a cup rather than filling it to a particular level. Given cross-linguistic differences in how event components are realized in language, past research has attributed such errors to non-adultlike event-language mappings. In the current study, we explore whether these errors have a non-linguistic origin. That is, when children view an event, is their encoding of the event end-state too imprecise to discriminate between events that do versus do not arrive at their intended endpoints? Using a habituation paradigm, we tested whether 13-month-old English-learning infants (N = 86) discriminated events with different degrees of completion (e.g., draw a complete triangle versus draw most of a triangle). Results indicated successful discrimination, suggesting that sensitivity to the precise event end-state is already in place in early infancy. Thus, our results rule out one possible explanation for children’s errors with change-of-state predicates—that they do not notice the difference between end-states that vary in completion.

中文翻译：

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13 个月大的孩子的事件最终状态编码——已完成的事件和未完成的事件是不同的

年幼的孩子有时会错误地解释具有“结果”含义的动词，例如将“填充”理解为是指将液体添加到杯子中，而不是将其填充到特定水平。鉴于事件组件如何在语言中实现的跨语言差异，过去的研究将此类错误归因于非成人事件语言映射。在当前的研究中，我们探讨这些错误是否具有非语言起源。也就是说，当孩子们查看一个事件时，他们对事件最终状态的编码是否太不精确而无法区分到达和未到达其预期终点的事件？使用习惯范式，我们测试了 13 个月大的英语学习婴儿是否（氮= 86) 具有不同完成程度的可区分事件（例如，绘制完整的三角形与绘制三角形的大部分）。结果表明区分是成功的，这表明对精确事件最终状态的敏感性在婴儿早期就已经存在。因此，我们的结果排除了儿童在状态变化谓词方面出现错误的一种可能的解释——他们没有注意到完成程度不同的最终状态之间的差异。