Maternal Question Use Relates to Syntactic Development in Children at School-Entry

Purpose: This study examined how mothers’ question-asking behavior relates to their child’s syntactic development. One important aspect of maternal question-asking behaviors is the use of complex questions when speaking to children. These questions can differ based on both their purpose and structure. The purpose may be to seek out information, to teach, or to get a simple yes/no response. Structurally, questions can include a WH- word (who, what, when, etc.) or not, but these WH- questions are important because they elicit utterances from the child and support vocabulary development. Despite WH-questions eliciting a response from children, it remains unknown how these questions relate to children’s syntactic development. Method: Thirty-four parent-child dyads participated in a 15-minute semi-naturalistic play session. The Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation assessment was used to measure syntactic knowledge in children. Using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT), questions were categorized based on structure (WH- versus non-WH) and purpose (information-seeking, pedagogical, or Y/N and rhetorical questions). Results: When controlling for total parent utterances, results revealed that mothers asked more non-WH and rhetorical questions overall; however, when asking WH- questions, they were predominantly information-seeking. This is important, as the use of information-seeking WH- questions was positively associated with children’s syntactic knowledge. Conclusions: Taken together, these findings suggest maternal use of WH- questions aids syntactic knowledge, likely because they require a more syntactically complex response on the child’s behalf.