Children's ability to answer different types of questions.
Published
Journal Article
Young children answer many questions every day. The extent to which they do this in an adult-like way - following Grice's Maxim of Quantity by providing the requested information, no more no less - has been studied very little. In an experiment, we found that two-, three- and four-year-old children are quite skilled at answering argument-focus questions and predicate-focus questions with intransitives in which their response requires only a single element. But predicate-focus questions for transitives - requiring both the predicate and the direct object - are difficult for children below four years of age. Even more difficult for children this young are sentence-focus questions such as "What's happening?", which give the child no anchor in given information around which to structure their answer. In addition, in a corpus study, we found that parents ask their children predicate-focus and sentence-focus questions very infrequently, thus giving children little experience with them.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- Salomo, D; Lieven, E; Tomasello, M
Published Date
- March 2013
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 40 / 2
Start / End Page
- 469 - 491
PubMed ID
- 22436663
Pubmed Central ID
- 22436663
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1469-7602
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 0305-0009
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1017/s0305000912000050
Language
- eng