Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Choosing Whom and What to Ask: Preschoolers’ Naturalistic Question Asking in a Preschool Setting

Sat, March 23, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 331

Integrative Statement

Children play an active role in their learning (Piaget, 1930). Question asking provides an important means by which children can explore and learn, and it may provide a powerful way to learn quickly about the world (Gopnik et al., 1997; Harris, 2012). Although past work demonstrates that children are sensitive to the knowledge state of potential informants (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005), less work has explored whether children spontaneously direct questions to adults over other children or themselves (who are less likely to be knowledgeable than adults). Further, it is unclear if adult-directed questions focus on content that is more likely to support general learning and whether this changes with development. Thus, in this study, we observed children’s naturally occurring questions in preschools. We first examined whether the frequency and content of preschoolers’ questions systematically differed depending on the target of the conversation. We next analyzed age-related changes in preschoolers’ question asking.

We recorded the speech productions of individual children ages 3 to 6 years in 40-min sessions during the preschool day. Every production was coded for speech target (i.e. adult, another child, or the self). Two independent coders identified whether each utterance was a question, and then classified questions into one of three subcategories based on speakers’ intention (Yu, Bonawitz, & Shafto, 2017): (a) Learning questions intended to acquire general or specific knowledge that can be applicable to different contexts, (b) Communication questions intended to be rhetorical or simply asking for clarification, (c) Situation-specific information intended to get episodic information such as seeking permission or checking the status of objects or others.

Our results (N = 30, totaling 2,232 utterances) showed that children’s speech was directed to other children more frequently (59% of utterances) than to adults (22%) or themselves (19%). To control for the difference in the amount of speech, we compared the percentage of questions to the percentage of other possible speech acts based on the target of speech production. Questions took up a greater percentage (24%) of children’s adult-directed speech as compared to the percentage of questions in child-directed (19%) and self-directed speech (11%), χ2(2) = 25.11, p < .001. Critically, although children asked many kinds of questions (including conversational clarifications, specific questions, and questions intended for general learning), children generated more questions with the intention of learning when talking to adults (27%) than to the other groups (5% child; 5% self; Fisher’s exact, p < .001; Figure 1). Older children directed more questions (30%) to adults relative to younger children (16%); however, even younger children were more likely to ask adults (25%) more learning questions than other children (6%) or themselves (0%; Fisher’s exact, p <.001).

Children ask abundant questions in early childhood (Callanan & Oakes, 1992; Chouinard, 2007). In this study, children’s selective information seeking was observed even in their unstructured and spontaneous social interactions. Our findings provide support for the claim that even young children consider whom and what to ask discriminately in their day-to-day conversations.

Authors