“Starting at the end: the importance of goals in spatial language” by Laura Lakusta and Barbara Landau addresses to the issue of linguistic encoding of Paths with the general focus on Source and Goal Paths. The research has been conducted through the exploration of children between the ages of three and seven, of children with Williams syndrome, and of normal adults. The results presented that a certain asymmetry exists between Goal and Source Paths, implying that Goal Path is frequently encoded, while Source Path is being often left out. This specific pattern actually comes up not depending on a group or domain (Manner of Motion, Change of Possession, Change of State, Attachment/Detachment) being explored. The question is whether individuals’ use of Paths is biased toward Goal, toward Source, or neither. The stated purpose of the discussed paper is to further explore a Goal Path bias and whether it is applied broadly.

Lakusta and Landau speculate that a Goal–Source asymmetry may be a point of structure that represents a significant bias, probably something pretty much like the tendency to encode causal agents as subjects. If this is true, linguistic theories suggesting that thematic hierarchies and linking rules should be accepted as a fact may consider advancing the role of Goal above the role of Source for verbs whose semantics include these components.

The importance of the subject discussed lies in its relation to human ability to form and represent happenings that “capture our spatial, temporal, and causal interactions in the world.” Acquiring words and phrases in early childhood we gain a capacity not only to observe objects and motions, but also to map paths and spatial-causal relationship into the acquired language knowledge. The authors claim that mentioned asymmetry between two kinds of paths influences the way we represent events, either linguistically or non-linguistically. If the claim is valid, than we can observe exclusion of Source Path in a diversity of various contexts, which is to be tasted.

The experiments were performed to support the authors’ claim. Participants of the experiments that were represented by several categories of people were told that they were going to watch short movies and that they were to describe ‘what happened’. Their descriptions where the actual focus of the experiment. To guarantee the validity of the testing, the tests were performed among all groups (children between the ages of three and seven, in children with Williams syndrome, and in normal adults) and across a broad range of domains including Manner of Motion, Change of Possession, Change of State, and Attachment/Detachment events.

The results of three experiments were that people mostly preferred to include Goal Paths in their prepositional phrases when describing some particular events linguistically. A bias towards the Goal Path was also revealed through the way children chose the verbs. According to the authors, the fact that such a tendency was as well observed among children with Williamson syndrome that have harsh spatial impairments, implies that there is obviously something truly fundamental about the strong inclination to prefer Goal Paths to Source one. This tendency occurs both in individuals’ viewpoint on events, and in the structure of language.

In the article the authors as well observe the fact that the final encoding of the verb and of the path presents complex sequence of factors that influence speaker’s decision on each stage of the process. The process indeed has several levels of complexity. The first one implies that an individual observe an event attentively without being confused by wrong conclusions. Than the speaker has to express what he has seen, making a choice of verb and of path expression if needed. And finally, the paths may vary over domains to which an event relates, which also makes a choice.