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Young children's responses to neutral and specific contingent queries*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Dina Anselmi ,
Michael Tomasello  and
Mary Acunzo
Dina Anselmi
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Hartford
Michael Tomasello*
Affiliation:
Emory University
Mary Acunzo
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Hartford
*
Michael Tomasello, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA.
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Abstract

This study examined young children's responses to adult contingent queries. Each of 22 children in Language Stages II–V conversed alone with their mother and alone with an adult experimenter. The adults queried the child's multi-word utterances with either a neutral or a specific query. Children at all stages responded differently to the two types of query. In response to the neutral query children tended to repeat their entire utterance, whereas in response to the specific query they most often replied with only the asked-for information. Some children found it easier to differentiate the query types when their mother was the listener. These findings suggest that very young children can comprehend the linguistic structure of specific queries and that they can make pragmatically appropriate responses.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , February 1986 , pp. 135 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported in part by a grant from Trinity College to the first author. We wish to express our thanks to the mothers, children, and day-care facilities that made this study possible. We are grateful to Larry Barsalou and Jeff Farrar for helpful comments.

References

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