Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Asking questions about unknown things involves recognizing knowledge gaps, identifying information sources, and for-mulating appropriate questions. This active involvement propels development by individualizing the learning environment.To characterize active engagement in word learning, we investigated whether preschoolers ask questions about novel vo-cabulary and evaluate definition quality. In Study 1, preschoolers were asked to perform actions following instructionswith novel (transpose) or familiar (switch) verbs. They asked more questions about novel (M = 3.31 out of 9, SD = 3.34)than familiar verbs (M = .17, SD = .44), t(35) = -5.68, p ¡ .001. In Study 2, informative or uninformative definitions wereprovided. Preliminary data suggest that preschoolers only asked questions when faced with uninformative definitions (M= .65 out of 3). When faced with novel words, preschoolers not only elicit questions, but also determine whether theirinformation needs have been met.