Language level predicts perceptual categorization of complex reversible events in children

Language plays a well-documented role in perceptual object categorization, but little is known about its role in the categorization of complex events. We explored this here with a perspective from age or developmentally appropriate language capacities in neurotypical children between the ages of two and four years (N = 21), and from delayed language development in a clinical group of children (N = 20), whose verbal mental ages (VMA) often fell far below their chronological ages (CAs). All participants watched two demonstrations of a series of transitive events (e.g. tiger jumps over a girl). The toy agents were then moved out of sight, and participants had to act out the same event type, based on a different tiger and girl that were selected among two distractors. We aimed to determine how mastery of this task relates to CA in the neurotypical group, and whether task performance in the clinical group was predicted by VMA and a standardized measure of grammatical comprehension. Results from a series of logistic mixed-effect regression models showed that neurotypical children start to perform correctly on this task with a chance of around 50% during their third year of CA but reach ceiling performance only during their fourth. A similar pattern emerged for VMA in the clinical group, despite a wide range of CAs and diagnoses. In addition, grammatical comprehension predicted performance. These patterns suggest that language competence plays a role in the perceptual categorization and encoding of complex reversible events. •Mental representations of complex event types were investigated.•An event imitation task was used in children with and without language disorders.•Chronological age and verbal mental age both predicted performance.•Grammatical comprehension in the clinical group did as well.•Cognizing complex events may be linguistically conditioned. Event cognition; Language impairment; Categorization; Abstraction; Concepts.