Three-year-olds' difficulty with the appearance--reality distinction: is it real or is it apparent?

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.