Developmental Changes in Question-Asking

Jones, Angela; Swaboda, Nora; Ruggeri, Azzurra

doi:10.1017/9781108553803.007

Cited by 11 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…Developing an effective intervention is challenging because it is still unclear what drives the observed developmental differences in the effectiveness and flexibility of information search, that is, why it is so hard for younger children to generate good questions from scratch (see Jones et al, 2020 ). On the one hand, previous research has explained age-related changes in the effectiveness of children’s questions as the result of their increasing ability to represent and organize the space of hypotheses under consideration at different hierarchical levels.…”

Section: The Present Papermentioning

confidence: 99%

How to Help Young Children Ask Better Questions?

et al. 2021

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In this paper, we investigate the informativeness of 4- to 6-year-old (N = 125) children’s questions using a combined qualitative and quantitative approach. Children were presented with a hierarchical version of the 20-questions game, in which they were given an array of objects that could be organized into three category levels based on shared features. We then tested whether it is possible to scaffold children’s question-asking abilities without extensive training. In particular, we supported children’s categorization performance by providing the object-related features needed to ask effective constraint-seeking questions. We found that with both age and scaffolding children asked more effective questions, targeting higher category levels and therefore reaching the solution with fewer questions. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these results.

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Section: The Present Papermentioning

confidence: 99%

How to Help Young Children Ask Better Questions?

et al. 2021

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“…Asking questions is a powerful learning tool that allows young learners to be precise about the information they want, inquire about absent objects or events, and address abstract concepts (Jones et al, 2020). Although the ability to ask effective questions develops from age 4 to adulthood (e.g., Herwig, 1982;Mosher & Hornsby, 1966;Ruggeri et al, 2016;Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015;Ruggeri & Lombrozo, 2015), from a very early age, children are able to tailor their questions to maximize their information gain (Ruggeri et al, 2017).…”

Section: Learning By Asking Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Alexa, let me ask you something different” Children's adaptive information search with voice assistants

Oranç

Ruggeri

2021

Human Behav and Emerg Tech

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In this study, we investigated how children interact with voice assistants, particularly focusing on what kinds of questions they ask and how they react to the responses obtained. We recorded 3-to 10-year-old children's (N = 43) spontaneous interactions with Amazon Alexa, and analyzed the questions they asked, as well as how they adjusted their information search based on the responses received. Our results confirm previous work in showing that children's questions are mostly information-seeking, yet the type of questions children ask also depends on their age and familiarity with voice assistants. For example, children who are younger and less familiar with voice assistants are more likely to ask questions about themselves and their environment (e.g., "What is my sister's name?"). We also show for the first time that, even though all children are sensitive to the relevance and accuracy of voice assistants' responses to a certain extent, older children are more likely to change the topic and type of the questions asked upon receiving irrelevant or uninformative responses.This study shows that, with age and familiarity, children become more sensitive to the behavior, informativeness, and constraints of artificial agents, growing into adaptive and sophisticated technology users.

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“…In this sense, younger children especially benefited from the maze, with performance differences between tasks decreasing with age and disappearing by age 7. This interestingly corresponds to one of the milestones in the development of children's information-search strategies (Jones, Swaboda, & Ruggeri, 2020), the point when children begin to ask more informative constraint-seeking questions (Herwig, 1982;Mosher & Hornsby, 1966;Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015;Ruggeri et al, , 2016). On the one hand, because performance of 7-year-olds in our 20-questions game was already very high, there might not have been enough room to observe a beneficial effect of the spatial layout.…”

Section: Discussion Of Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Finding the (most efficient) way out of a maze is easier than asking (good) questions.

Swaboda

Meder

Ruggeri

2020

Preprint

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We investigate whether a spatial representation of a search task supports 4- to 7-year-old children’s information-search strategies, relative to their performance in a question-asking game. In Experiment 1, children played two computationally and structurally analogous search games: a spatial search task, the maze-exploration game, in which they had to discover the path through a maze, and a verbal search task, the 20-questions game, where they had to identify a target monster from a set of eight monsters by asking yes-no questions. We found that children made more informative queries in the maze-exploration game than in the 20-questions game. Children’s performance in the 20-questions game improved with age, whereas there were no age-related differences in the spatial task. In Experiment 2, we introduced a non-verbal version of the 20-questions game, in which children had to select which features to query (e.g., color) in order to identify the target monster. We found that children performed equally well in both tasks, with no age-related performance differences. Our results demonstrate that efficient search strategies emerge much earlier than previously assumed, suggesting that young children’s difficulties in the 20-questions game are directly related to the verbal requirements of the task. These findings highlight the importance of developing age-appropriate paradigms that capture children’s early competence, in order to gain a more comprehensive picture of their emerging information-search abilities.

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Developmental Changes in Question-Asking

Cited by 11 publications

References 77 publications

How to Help Young Children Ask Better Questions?

How to Help Young Children Ask Better Questions?

“Alexa, let me ask you something different” Children's adaptive information search with voice assistants

Finding the (most efficient) way out of a maze is easier than asking (good) questions.

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