Young children's responses to neutral and specific contingent queries

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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.

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