Journal Articles

1. Salomo, D; Lieven, E; Tomasello, M, Children's ability to answer different types of questions., Journal of child language, vol. 40 no. 2 (March, 2013), pp. 469-491.
   (last updated on 2024/11/04)

   Abstract:
   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.