012 - Verbs of Perception

Verb of Perception. Definition:

A verb (such as see, watch, look, hear, listen, feel, and taste) that conveys the experience of one of the physical senses. Also calledperception verb or perceptual verb.

• "I discovered that to achieve perfect personal silence all I had to do was to attach myself leechlike to sound. I began to listen to everything. I probably hoped that after I hadheard all the sounds, really heard them, and packed them down, deep in my ears, the world would be quiet around me."
  (Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Random House, 1969)
• "This is the pit of loneliness, in an office on a summer Saturday. I stand at the window andlook down at the batteries and batteries of offices across the way, recalling how the thing looks in winter twilight when everything is going full blast, every cell lighted, and how you can see in pantomime the puppets fumbling with their slips of paper (but you don't hear the rustle), see them pick up their phone (but you don't hear the ring), see the noiseless, ceaseless moving about of so many passers of pieces of paper . . .."
  (E.B.White, Here Is New York. Harper, 1949)
• "Now perchance many sounds & sights only remind me that they once said something to me, and are so by association interesting. . . . I see a skunk on bare garden hill stealing noiselessly away from me, while the moon shines over the pitch pines which send long shadows down the hill . . .. I smell the huckleberry bushes. . . . Now I hear the sound of a bugle in the 'Corner' reminding me of Poetic Wars, a few flourishes & the bugler has gone to rest."
  (Henry David Thoreau, July 11, 1851. A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851, ed. by H. Daniel Peck. Penguin, 1993)

Videos

The difference between See, Look and Watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtM1v1YZXhU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObMbNufZkaY

Example and use of some verbs of perception

http://www.eslgold.com/grammar/verbs_perception.html
http://www.tolearnenglish.com/exercises/exercise-english-2/exercise-english-52232.php