Jingying Xu

Languages have sophisticated ways of encoding the temporal structure of events, signaling different types of endings either explicitly or implicitly. Jingying’s project investigates how language and context influence the interpretation of event descriptions in English and Mandarin, focusing on both children and adults. We aim to address three key questions:

• How do linguistic elements—such as verbs, direct objects, and tense/aspect markers in English and Mandarin, two typologically distinct languages—affect the way children and adults evaluate whether events have reached their natural endpoints?
• What is the developmental trajectory of aspectual understanding in English- and Mandarin-speaking children, and what causes the non-adultlike responses often observed in children?
• How does visual context interact with language to shape how children and adults perceive events and interpret event descriptions?ect.