Young Children’s Directed Question Asking in Preschool Classrooms

Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly gain information about the world. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit sensitivity to the knowledge state of potential informants in laboratory settings. However, it remains unclear whether and how young children are inclined to direct questions that support learning deeper content to more knowledgeable informants in naturalistic classroom contexts. In this study, we examined children’s question-asking targets (adults, other preschoolers, self-talk) during an open-play period in a US preschool classroom and assessed how the cognitive and linguistic characteristics of questions varied as a function of the intended recipient. Further, we examined how these patterns changed with age. We recorded the spontaneous speech of individual children between the ages of 3 and 6 years (N = 30, totaling 2875 utterances) in 40-min open-period sessions in their preschool day, noting whether the speech was directed toward an adult, another child, or was stated to self. We publish this fully transcribed database with contextual and linguistic details coded as open access to all future researchers. We found that questions accounted for a greater proportion of preschoolers’ adult-directed speech than of their child-directed and self-directed speech, with a particular increase in questions that supported broader learning goals when directed to an adult. Younger children directed a higher proportion of learning questions to adults than themselves, whereas older children asked similar proportions of questions to both, suggesting a difference in younger and older children’s question-asking strategies. Although children used greater lexical diversity in questions than in other utterances, their question formulation in terms of length and diversity remained consistent across age and recipient types, reflecting their general linguistic abilities. Our findings reveal that children discriminately choose “what” and “whom” to ask in daily spontaneous conversations. Even in less-structured school contexts, preschoolers direct questions to the informant most likely to be able to provide an adequate answer.