Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of young children's appearance-reality distinction. When young children are asked questions about objects with misleading appearances, they make two kinds of errors ; phenomenism and intellectual realism. Such error pattern might reflect either a genuine, deep-seated inability to understand and think about the appearance-reality distinction or it might reflect only task insensitivity. So experiment 1 confirmed that children's performances didn't reflect a misinterpretation of the experimenter's intent in communication under repeated questioning. And experiment 2 examined that the presence or absence of a transformation could be related to the types of the appearance-reality error. The results demonstrated that children's appearance-reality judgments were not associated with the transformation. Phenomenism errors predominated when children were asked about real and apparent properties, whereas intellectual realism errors predominated when children were asked about objects' real and apparent identities, The findings were discussed briefly in relation to the dual coding hypothesis.