How does a blind person see? Developmental change in applying visual verbs to agents with disabilities

Abstract

Classic theories emphasize the primacy of first-person sensory experience for learning meanings of words: to know what “see” means, one must be able to use the eyes to perceive. Contrary to this idea, blind adults and children acquire normative meanings of “visual” verbs, e.g., interpreting “see” and “look” to mean with the eyes for sighted agents. Here we ask the flip side of this question: how easily do sighted children acquire the meanings of “visual” verbs as they apply to blind agents? We asked sighted 4, 6- and 9 year-olds to tell us what part of the body a blind or a sighted agent would use to “see”, “look” (and other visual verbs, n=15), vs. “listen”, “smell” (and other non-visual verbs, n=15). Even the youngest children consistently reported the correct body parts for sighted agents (eyes for “look”, ears for “listen”). By contrast, there was striking developmental change in applying “visual” verbs to blind agents. Adults, 9- and 6-year-olds, either extended visual verbs to other modalities for blind agents (e.g., “seeing” with hands or a cane) or stated that the blind agent “cannot” “look” or “see”. By contrast, 4-year-olds said that a blind agent would use her eyes to “see”, “look”, etc., even while explicitly acknowledging that the agent’s “eyes don’t work”. Young children also endorsed “she is looking at the dax” descriptions of photographs where the blind agent had the object in her “line of sight,” irrespective of whether she had physical contact with the object. This pattern held for leg-motion verbs (“walk”, “run”) applied to wheelchair users. The ability to modify verb modality for agents with disabilities undergoes developmental change between 4 and 6. Despite this, we find that 4-year-olds are sensitive to the semantic distinction between active (“look”) and stative (“see”), even when applied to blind agents. These results challenge the primacy of first-person sensory experience and highlight the importance of linguistic input and social interaction in the acquisition of verb meaning.

Lack of Visual Experience Affects Multimodal Language Production: Evidence From Congenitally Blind and Sighted People

“…On the one hand, 3‐year‐old blind children understand the semantics of vision‐related words—such as look and see—in a manner comparable to their sighted peers (Elli et al., 2021; Landau & Gleitman, 1985). Studies on word comprehension also show no difference between blind and sighted people in semantic judgments of object concepts, actions, and vision‐related terms (Bedny et al., 2012, 2019; Kim et al., 2021; Mahon et al., 2009; Marmor, 1978; Saysani et al., 2021).…”

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

“…That is, see can report a belief one has about one thing (such as a book falling) as a result of perceiving of something else with entirely different visual properties (such as a book on the floor). Previous research has shown that young children (around age 4) do in fact have difficulty learning some aspects of perception verb semantics, and tend to assign narrower meanings to perception verbs than older children or adults, treating verbs like see as only reporting an event involving direct perception with one's eyes (Landau & Gleitman 1985, Elli, Bedny & Landau 2021.…”