Mothers’ Use of Questions and Children’s Learning and Language Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter presents results from a longitudinal investigation of the form and function of mothers' questions to their one–, two–, and three–year–old children in a challenging task context across a diverse sample of 64 families in Norway. We examine the implications of mothers' questions for children's concurrent task performance and later language development. The findings suggest that mothers vary quite a bit in their use of questions. Moreover, the mothers show a decrease in their use of questions that are direct in their informational intent and/or simpler in their form over time, and an increase in questions that are indirect in intent and complex in their form (wh-questions). Mothers who more often ask wh–questions at child age two years have children with higher language skills at age four years, whereas use of simpler questions at child age two is negatively related to children's concurrent task success and later language skills. Together with the existing literature, this study suggests that questions are not just a mechanism for cognitive development because they allow children to obtain the information they need, but also that parental questions scaffold children's language and possibly cognitive development more general by guiding their exploration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".