Cognitive grammar.

Kersten, Earles, and Berger (2015) reported a distinction between two kinds of motion representations. Extrinsic motions involve the path of a person or object, with respect to an external frame of reference. Intrinsic motions involve the manner in which the various parts of a person or object move. They found that intrinsic motions are encoded and remembered with the corresponding actor performing the motions in a unitized memory representation. Extrinsic motions are encoded as separate memory representations, making them more difficult to accurately associate with the correct actor. In the proposed experiment, I will examine the generality of this distinction in motion representation, and investigate whether the unitization of intrinsic motion with its corresponding actor occurs during reading comprehension tasks.

The current study examined the role of complexity and initial variability of
exemplars during learning in verb generalization. Children and adults learned two novel
verbs in the context of two novel creatures across two sessions. After a second training
session, participants completed a generalization task during which they were required to
identify the verbs when presented with seven novel creatures of varying levels of
complexity. Performance was compared across age group and condition. Participants who
initially learned the verbs in the context of a single, simple exemplar demonstrated a
higher proportion of correct responses than participants who initially learned the verbs
with both a simple & complex exemplar. These results provide evidence that fewer
exemplars during initial training of novel verbs may increase learning in young children,
as well as some evidence that complex exemplars may increase the difficulty of learning
and generalizing verbs.