Poster #118 - Seeing vs. Seeing That: Children's understanding of syntactic markers of perception and inference

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Young children can reason about and differentiate direct perception and inference, but fully mapping this understanding to particular linguistic forms that distinctly encode the two different knowledge sources comes later in development (Ünal & Papafragou, 2018). In English, this difference can be marked lexically (e.g. see vs. think or guess) or syntactically. For example, perception verbs with small clause complements (“I saw something happen”) report direct perception of an event as it occurred, while perception verbs with sentential complements (“I saw that something happened”) can be used for reports of visually-based inference about an event.
We sought to determine whether and when young English-speaking children map the conceptual distinction between visual perception and visually-based inference to different syntactic frames expressing this distinction. We presented 36 children (ages 4;0-9;01, mean 6;5) with eight illustrated stories in which one character directly perceives an event, and a second character encounters only visual evidence that could lead to an inference that the event had occurred. After each story, participants heard a Direct Perception sentence containing see with a small clause complement (e.g. “I saw Fido eating the cookies”) and an Inference sentence containing see with a sentential complement (e.g. “I saw that Fido had eaten the cookies”), then were asked to identify which of the two characters could have said either the Direct Perception (4 trials) or Inference sentence (4 trials). Responses were considered correct if participants attributed the Direct Perception sentence to the direct perception character and the Inference sentence to the inferring character. Adult participants (n=6) always followed this pattern.
We found no effect of age for performance on the Direct Perception sentences (β=0.02, SE=0.02, p>0.05); children were at ceiling in attributing Direct Perception sentences to the direct perception characters (M=0.91, t(35)=14.407, p<0.05). By contrast, performance varied with age for the Inference sentences (β=0.11, SE=0.03, p<0.05). Children under 7 (n=23, M=5;5) were at chance for Inference sentences (M=0.55; t(22)=0.8941, p>0.05), attributing them to the Direct Perception character on half the trials on average, whereas children over 7 (n=13, M=8;4) performed above chance for these sentences (M=0.96, t(12)=17.725, p<0.05), essentially like adults (M=0.96). We also found that age significantly predicted a joint measure of performance on the two sentence types. Older children were more likely to perform above chance on both, while younger children were more likely to perform above chance for Direct Perception but below chance for Inference (β=-0.97, SE=0.4, p<0.05; Figure 1).
These results indicate that children between 4 and 7 typically interpret see as reporting direct perception, even when syntactic and contextual cues make inference interpretations highly salient. After age 7, children begin to consistently make adult-like distinctions between frames and understand that see with a sentential complement can report visually-based inference. This suggests that English-speaking children under 7 are still in the process of learning the syntax and semantics of perception verbs and of mapping the conceptual distinction between perception and inference to syntactic forms that can express different kinds of perceptual experience.

Authors

• E. Emory Davis, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author

• Barbara Landau, Johns Hopkins University
  Non-Presenting Author