2018 Sat Poster 6385

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Does see that help children learn think that? The intersection of perception and mental verbs in development
E. Davis, B. Landau

Perception is a fundamental source of information for structuring our knowledge and beliefs about the world. Existing literature indicates that children’s understanding of mental states is linked to their understanding of perception (1,2) and to the acquisition of mental verbs and propositional syntax, especially sentential complements (3,4). Perception verbs and mental verbs overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in I think that Sally left and I see that Sally left. Their shared syntax raises the possibility that acquisition of perception and mental verbs may be linked, consistent with the theoretical framework of syntactic bootstrapping (5). However, little is known about children’s acquisition of perception verbs and their complement structures, compared to mental verbs.

We explore whether such syntactic information is evident in young children’s production of perception and mental verbs and what their developmental timelines are. One possibility, following Gopnik et al.’s (6) proposal that understanding perception fosters an understanding of belief, is that perception verbs serve as a model for mental verbs in acquisition. If so, children should produce perception verbs earlier than mental verbs with the same complements.

Embedded complements are critical for highlighting shared semantics, as these structures are used to reference the content of mental states.

To test this possibility, we examined children’s production of perception and mental verbs in their syntactic contexts in the Brown corpus (7). We extracted children’s and parents’ utterances containing a subset of early-acquired perception and mental verbs (Table 1), and manually coded the syntactic frames, focusing on the structure of verbal complements (Table 2). We examined the proportions of verb types and frames produced by children and their parents. We focused on embedded frames used with experience perception verbs like see (8), which encode reference to mental representations resulting from perception and which, like mental verbs, take embedded complements.

Overall, children produced more perception than mental verbs between 2-4.5 years (t(24.572)=-3.03, p<0.05; Figure 1). However, children were significantly more likely to use embedded frames with mental verbs than with perception verbs (β = 3.51, SE = 0.76, p < 0.05),  and the increase in embedded frames with age was greater for mental verbs than perception verbs (β=-0.41, SE=0.19, p<0.05; Figure 2). These patterns did not reflect parental input: parents produced roughly equal proportions of both verb types (t(27.854)=0.53, p>0.05), and consistently used embedded frames more than children for both perception (β=-1.47, SE=0.33, p<0.05) and mental verbs (β=-1.54, SE=0.30, p<0.05).

Our results make it appear unlikely that perception verbs serve as a model for learning mental verbs via syntax. If anything, the data suggest that children may acquire propositional syntax for mental verbs prior to fully grasping that perception verbs participate in the same syntactic contexts, suggesting that early knowledge of perception verbs may be incomplete, and is later updated. This conclusion, however, awaits further testing (now in progress), including experimental probes that test children’s understanding of how the interpretation of perception verbs can vary depending on their complements, including embedded clauses.

References

  1. Flavell, J. H. (2004). Development of Knowledge about Vision. In D. T. Levin (Ed.), Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children (pp. 13–36). Cambridge, MA: MIT
  2. Song, H., & Baillargeon, R. (2008). Infants’ reasoning about others’ false perceptions. Developmental Psychology, 44(6), 1789–1795.
  3. Lohmann, , & Tomasello, M. (2003). The role of language in the development of false belief understanding: a training study. Child Development, 74(4), 1130–1144.
  4. Papafragou, A., Cassidy, K., & Gleitman, L. R. (2007). When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs. Cognition, 105(1), 125–165.
  5. Landau, B., & Gleitman, L. R. (1985). Language and Experience: Evidence from the Blind Child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
  6. Gopnik, , Slaughter, V., & Meltzoff, A. (1994). Changing your views: how understanding visual perception can lead to a new theory of the mind. In C. Lewis & P. Mitchell (Eds.), Children’s Early Understanding of Mind: Origins and Development (pp. 157–181). Hillsdale (USA): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  7. Brown, (1973). A first language: The early stages. Harvard University Press.
  8. Viberg, A. (1983). The verbs of perception: a typological study. Linguistics, 21(1), 123-162.