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

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