title: Three-year-olds' difficulty with the appearance--reality distinction: is it real or is it apparent?
abstract: Four experiments investigated 3-year-olds' understanding of the appearance-reality distinction using both J. Flavell, F. Green, and J. Flavell's (1986) typical verbal response paradigm and a new, nonverbal response paradigm. Both paradigms require verbal questioning, but the former involves a verbal response and the latter a nonverbal one. In the nonverbal paradigm, children were shown a deceptive object and asked to respond, nonverbally, to 2 different functional requests, 1 concerning the object's apparent property and 1 its real property. In the verbal paradigm, children were asked to state what the object looked like and what it really was. In the verbal paradigm, children were about 30% correct (a rate matching that in the literature), whereas over 90% of the same children were correct in the nonverbal paradigm. Participating in the verbal paradigm first had a detrimental effect on the children's performance in the nonverbal paradigm, but the reverse order had no effect. These results suggest that 3-year-olds can represent two conflicting properties of a deceptive object and thus understand the appearance-reality distinction in the nonverbal domain.
authors.affiliation: Queen's U.
authors.forename: Felicity
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Sapp
authors.forename: Kang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Darwin
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Muir
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011936:Reality Testing