Paul Harris
In the early 1960s, three young children growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts (“Adam,” “Eve,” and “Sarah”) received a regular visit from a researcher each month. Armed with a tape recorder, the researcher
recorded each child’s spontaneous speech, typically directed at parents. These visits were part
of a groundbreaking study directed by Harvard
psycholinguist Roger Brown (1973), designed
to find out how children gradually move from
telegraphic, two- or three-word utterances to
more elaborate sentences.
As time went on, more children joined the
initial group of three; the researchers transcribed everything the children said and performed hundreds of analyses of the children’s
speech. In the 1980s, Brian Mac Whinney and
Catherine Snow entered these transcripts as
some of the first documents in their Child
Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES)
( http://childes.psy.cmu.edu), which has grown
into a huge database that allows researchers
to take a close look at how children acquire
language.
Recently, researchers have conducted
analyses that have expanded beyond the study
of syntax. In particular, children’s questions
have come under the spotlight.
Past Doubts About Questions
Surprisingly, there’s been a long tradition of
skepticism about the value of children’s questions as a learning tool—variously expressed
by philosophers, educators, and psychologists
(Harris, 2012). In Emile, his classic work on
education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762/1979)
argued that supplying answers to children’s
questions would make them too trusting
of adult authority and that it was better for
children to work out answers for themselves.
The English educator Susan Isaacs (1930)
agreed. In setting out her teaching philosophy,
What Children
LEARN
from Questioning
A rich body of research shows that children use
questions to learn at home—but this pattern
changes when they enter school.
