Participant Costs for Individuating and comparing objects and events

Linguists say that sentences are about events, but what does that mean? This project focuses on the properties of the language that children and adults use to talk about events, and how it compares to talk of objects. A series of studies is proposed to investigate how individuals determine when something that happened counts as a proper 'event', and how that determination impacts comparison with words like 'more'. This study will thus provide insight into how the mind structures its experience of the world, and how that structure affects language understanding. It emphasizes the role of natural language semantics in hypothesizing both about language and cognitive psychology.