| dc.description.abstract | Asking questions is one way that young children elicit word-related input. Children appear to be well-positioned to use questions as a tool for learning words. However, whether and how children’s questions impact their learning and memory has been understudied. Asking a question about a word may increase attention to and encoding of the anticipated answer, leading to improved retention of the novel word. Alternatively, children may experience cognitive costs associated with asking questions, making it more difficult to encode and retain the novel meaning. The current study tests whether asking questions improves children’s novel word retention, compared to their retention when listening to the same information. Four- to six-year-old children (N = 64) were randomly assigned to a Question-Asking or Listening condition. Participants were asked to retrieve a novel object out of an array of novel objects according to a novel label, such that there was ambiguity about the named referent upon hearing only the novel label. In the Question-Asking condition, participants had the opportunity to ask questions to an experimenter to help them select the target referents. The experimenter responded to questions with a standard set of feature descriptions of the novel objects. In the Listening condition, participants heard the same descriptions, but heard each description immediately after the novel label. Participants’ selections after they heard the descriptions as well as their selections on a later retention test were recorded and compared across conditions. Children in both groups showed above-chance retention of the novel words, but children who had an opportunity to ask a question learned the same number of words as children who listened to the label information. The results of this work suggest that asking a question does not provide a boost for novel word learning, prompting consideration of the utility of question-asking beyond the potential benefits for retention. | |
