Children's Understanding of Informational Access as Source of Knowledge

Wimmer, Heinz; Hogrefe, G.-Jurgen; Perner, Josef

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1988.tb01474.x

Cited by 115 publications

(184 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

168

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Performance on the indirect access (Hear and Infer) type of the items was shown to improve over time, a finding in line with previous literature claiming an asymmetry in the development of different types of sources of information. According to this literature, visual perception is the most readily source accessible to young children, with verbal information following visual perception and inference being the most complex and least accessible information source for the young child (Wimmer & Hogrefe, 1988). The comparison of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed an asymmetry between children's linguistic command of evidential morphology and the ability to report non-linguistic knowledge sources, with non-linguistic source monitoring preceding the acquisition of linguistic evidentiality.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Acquisition of Evidentiality and Source Monitoring

Öztürk

Papafragou

2015

Language Learning and Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Three-and 4-year olds have been reported to have difficulty understanding that a person who has been verbally informed about the contents of a box has informational access and would know what is in the box (Wimmer & Hogrefe, 1988;cf. Pratt & Bryant, 1990).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acquisition of Evidentiality and Source Monitoring

Öztürk

Papafragou

2015

Language Learning and Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Studies looking at children's ability to explicitly identify the evidence for their beliefs generally conclude that young children are unable to at encode source information the time of experiencing an event; furthermore, the problem is more specific than simple memory limitations (Gopnik & Graf, 1988;O'Neill & Chong, 2001;O'Neill & Gopnik, 1991;Pillow, 1989;Povinelli & de Blois, 1992;Wimmer, Hogrefe, & Perner, 1988;Wimmer, Hogrefe, & Sodian, 1988;Woolley & Bruell, 1996). Typically, in these tasks, children discover the contents of a container through a single type of source (e.g.…”

Section: The Development Of Source Monitoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidentiality in language and cognition

et al. 2007

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3-and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable ☆ We wish to thank Lila Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Eleni Miltsakaki, and the other members of the CHEESE seminar at the University of Pennsylvania for discussion of this project. Thanks also to Seungyun Yang for experimental help. This research was partly supported by NIH/NRSA Grants #F32MH065020 to Anna Papafragou and #1F32HD043532 to Peggy Li and by SSHRC Grant #410-2003-0544 to Chung-hye Han. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: papafragou@psych.udel.edu ,pegs@wjh.harvard.edu, youngonc@sas.upenn.edu, chunghye@sfu.ca. 15 Again, the basic results do not change regardless of the which linguistic score was compared with which non-linguistic score. There is always an effect of Task (Non-linguistic better than Linguistic), and always an effect of Task × Age (with a larger Age effect for Nonlinguistic than Linguistic tasks). 24 Such mapping problems have been originally pointed out and discussed in the context of learning procedures for mental verbs (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Gleitman, 1990;Papafragou, Cassidy, Gleitman, & Hulbert, 2004;Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). As these authors point out, observational cues to the meaning of mental verbs such as think or believe are few and impoverished compared to those for action verbs such as catch or eat. On at least some occas...

show abstract

“…Figure 1 offers a metaphorical depiction of these two levels of understanding visual perception. Other research has confirmed and extended these findings by demonstrating that 4-to 5 year-olds, but not younger children, appear to understand that visual perception causes internal knowledge states in both the self and others (Wimmer, Hogrefe & Perner, 1988;Gopnik & Graf, 1988;Perner & Ogden, 1988;Povinelli & deBlois, 1992;Ruffman & Olson, 1989;O'Neill & Gopnik, 1991;O'Neill, Astington & Flavell, 1992). 2 Having previously obtained largely unconvincing results in studies examining chimpanzees' understanding of the connection between seeing and knowing (see Section V), we turned our attention to what (in humans at least) appears to be a less sophisticated (or …”

mentioning

confidence: 69%

Toward a science of other minds: escaping the argument by analogy

2000

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states.

show abstract

Children's Understanding of Informational Access as Source of Knowledge

Cited by 115 publications

References 14 publications

The Acquisition of Evidentiality and Source Monitoring

The Acquisition of Evidentiality and Source Monitoring

Evidentiality in language and cognition

Toward a science of other minds: escaping the argument by analogy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About