Learning verbs is difficult and critical to learning one's native language. Children appear to benefit from seeing multiple events and comparing them to each other, and structural alignment theory provides a good theoretical framework to guide research into how preschool children may be comparing events as they learn new verbs. The talk will include 6 studies of early verb learning that make use of eye-tracking procedures as well as other behavioral (pointing) procedures, and that test key predictions from SA theory including the prediction that seeing similar examples before more varied examples helps observers learn how to compare (progressive alignment) and the prediction that when events have very low alignability with other events, that is one cue that the events should be ignored. Whether or how statistical learning may also be at work will be considered.

In human and non-human animals, conceptual knowledge is partially organized according to low-dimensional geometries that rely on brain structures and computations involved in spatial representations. Recently, two separate lines of research have investigated cognitive maps, that are associated with the hippocampal formation and are similar to world-centered representations of the environment, and image spaces, that are associated with the parietal cortex and are similar to self-centered spatial relationships. I will suggest that cognitive maps and image spaces may be two manifestations of a more general propensity of the mind to create low-dimensional internal models, and may play a role in analogical reasoning and metaphorical thinking. Finally, I will show some data suggesting that the metaphorical relationship between colors and emotions can be accounted for by the structural alignment of low-dimensional conceptual spaces.