Seeing vs. Seeing That: Children's Understanding of Direct Perception and Inference Reports

E Emory Davis,Barbara Landau

doi:10.3765/elm.1.4864

Abstract

Young children can reason about direct and indirect visual information, but fully mapping this understanding to linguistic forms encoding the two knowledge sources appears to come later in development. In English, perception verbs with small clause complements ('I saw something happen') report direct perception of an event, while perception verbs with sentential complements ('I saw that something happened') can report inferences about an event. In two experiments, we ask when 4-9-year-old English-speaking children have linked the conceptual distinction between direct perception and inference to different complements expressing this distinction. We find that, unlike older children or adults, 4-6-year-olds do not recognize that see with a sentential complement can report visually-based inference, even when syntactic and contextual cues make inference interpretations highly salient. These results suggest a prolonged developmental trajectory for learning how the syntax of perception verbs like see maps to their semantics.

Highlights

The use of perception verbs like see or hear with different complement structures often corresponds to reporting distinct kinds of perceptual experiences
The expected adult-like responses to the target sentences for each visual access condition were based on adult performance in Experiment 1, as well as another experiment not reported here, which showed that under some circumstances, adults accept both see and see that for direct perception events
Participants with adult-like knowledge of the semantics of see were expected to judge Direct Perception sentences (“I saw...”) as “right” only when Mary saw the event directly (See Event trials); to judge Inference sentences (“I saw that...”) as “right” when Mary either saw the event (See Event trials) or saw evidence of it (See Evidence trials); and to judge both target sentences as wrong when Mary did not see any aspect of the event (Doesn’t See trials)

Summary

Introduction

The use of perception verbs like see or hear with different complement structures often corresponds to reporting distinct kinds of perceptual experiences. While (2) can be true for Mary in that same situation, it can be true if Mary walked into the room after the book fell and noticed it on the floor next to the shelf This distinction relates to source monitoring, the ability to reflect on and distinguish between various sources of information and knowledge. An individual like John in (1), who directly witnesses an event as it occurs, has a different perceptual experience from an individual like Mary in (2), who may have only seen the outcome of that event; even if John and Mary end up with similar representations of an event of a book falling off a shelf, John’s representation is based on directly witnessing the event, while Mary’s is based on an inference

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Discussion

Conclusion