It Still Isn't Over: Event Boundaries in Language and Perception

The interaction between language and perception networks in the brain can hold the key to the biological bases of language evolution. In language, every sentence is built around a verb, which describes an event. During perception, humans constantly and automatically segment reality into individualized event (verb) units. The cognitive connection between the perceptual segmentation of events and their grammatical expression in language is a novel direction for research into the neurobiology of language, but it may be a key example of the emergence of linguistic structure – grammatical category – from individualized meaning. This article summarizes the current state of this research, and is divided into three parts. The initial overview of cross-linguistic typology of events shows that events and their boundaries are of vital importance to linguistic communication. We then summarize what is known about perceiving and identifying event boundaries in the most well-studied domain, that of visual perception. Here, sign languages provide the link between visual perception and linguistic expression, showing a complex mapping from perceptual and cognitive event segmentation to linguistic structures at the phonology– syntax interface. The last section reviews current evidence for neural bases of event processing, showing that identification of an event boundary (linguistic or perceptual) is used for memory updates, and suggesting the possible role of an event-type universal in the syntactic structure of human languages.