Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although children are on the receiving end of pedagogical questions (asked with an intent to teach) and information-seeking questions (asked with an intent to seek information), little is known about how children differentiate between the two types of questions. Here, we tested if parents spontaneously modulate their prosody when asking pedagogical as opposed to information- seeking questions. To test this, we asked 35 parent- child pairs to engage in a learning game where parents were asking questions while being in the role of a teacher (pedagogical) or in the role of a student (information- seeking). Next, 128 naïve listeners judged the questions produced by parents. We found that naïve listeners could reliably differentiate the two types of questions on the basis of prosody alone. This finding highlights the importance of prosody as a mechanism for communicating pedagogical intent in parent-child interactions.