Taking the C-nic Route: Object-Directedness and Path, Not Efficiency, Shape Adults' Word Extension

What intuitions guide adults in extending the meanings of new words? Are these intuitions consistent with prelinguistic sensitivities operative in infancy? Across two preregistered experiments, adult participants saw simple grid-world environments in which characters moved in a “C” path efficiently (or not) to an object (or not). These events were labeled with a novel verb or noun. Participants were asked whether that word applied to new events varying in object-directedness, path, and efficiency. By contrast to infants’ focus on efficiency, adults instead focused on object-directedness and path, and they did so similarly for both verbs and nouns. Language might thus build on universal, prelinguistic assumptions of goal-directedness and efficiency to specify what goal an agent might have (e.g., object- vs. location-directed) as well as how an agent might achieve that goal (e.g., this vs. that kind of path), ultimately restricting the hypothesis space for action understanding and supporting learning.