Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, pro- viding a means by which young learners can rapidly gain infor- mation about the world. Although past work demonstrates that children are sensitive to the knowledge state of potential infor- mants (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005), less work has explored whether children spontaneously direct questions to adults over other children (who are less likely to be knowledgeable), and in particular if adult-directed questions focus on content that is more likely to support general learning. We recorded in- dividual children’s spontaneous speech in 40-minute sessions during their preschool day; for every production we coded whether the speech was directed towards an adult, another child, or was stated to self. Our results (N = 30, totaling 2,232 utterances) showed that questions took up a greater proportion of children’s adult-directed speech as compared to the pro- portion of questions in child-directed and self-directed speech. Furthermore, although children asked many kinds of questions (including conversational clarifications, specific information questions, and questions intended for general learning), chil- dren more frequently asked the questions intended for learning when they spoke to adults than to the other groups. Analysis revealed a developmental effect, with results strongest for the older preschoolers. Our findings suggest that children discrim- inately choose ”what” and ”whom” to ask in daily conversa- tions, and this ability improves over the course of development.