title: Children's ability to answer different types of questions.
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.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Dorothé
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Salomo
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lieven
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tomasello
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D001076:Aptitude; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014741:Video Recording; D014796:Visual Perception