Infants' Perception of Semantically Defined Action Role Changes in Filmed Events.

Many researchers (Brown, 1973; Edwards, 1973; Ervin-Tripp, 1971; Lenneberg, 1967; Macnamara, 1972; Wells, 1974) have argued that the acquisition of language is based on a cognitive nonlinguistic base made up of concepts, categories, and meanings. The cognitive relations constructed by the infant from sensori-motor interactions in the world are translated into language and appear as semantic rela tions in early multi-word, and perhaps even single-word, utterances (Bloom, 1970; Brown, 1973; Greenfield & Smith, 1976; Schlesinger, 1971). Schlesinger (1974) has written that there "seems to be no evidence for the psychological reality of any classification of these [cognitive] relations." However, some evidence for the psychological reality of one set of these relations does exist. With the habituation paradigm, preliminary attempts to operationalize the categories of "agent" and "recipient" have provided support for infants' discrimina tions of these relations in perceptual events (Gilmore, Suci, & Chan, 1974, Note 1; Golinkoff, 1975; McHale, 1973). "Agent" is defined as the animate actor initiating an action while "recipient" is the animate or inanimate receiver of the action. The agent-recipient distinction is fundamental in recent linguistic ac counts of the semantic units that underlie language processing (Chafe, 1970; Fillmore, 1968). Suci (1971, Note 2) has termed this dichotomy action role and his research (Suci & Hamacher, 1972) as well as others' (e.g., Shafto, 1973), has indicated that the.action role distinc tion is a psychologically significant aspect of sentence processing. The primary purpose of the present study was to examine infants'