Prelinguistic Understanding of Collective & Distributive Events

Abstract

English Universal Quantifiers, like 'each' and 'all', describe events where all actors engage in an action. However, they differ in usage. 'Each' can only describe distributive (individual) actions, whereas 'all' can also describe collective actions. This research seeks to determine if infants can distinguish between collective and distributive events before acquiring language. We showed infants non-linguistic videos of animated chevrons chasing balls either collectively or distributively. We looked to see if infants noticed a difference between the videos. Current results suggest that infants can distinguish between these events, but further work is needed.