A study in 2005 by Rivera et. al. decided to analyze how children of different ages listen and respond to questions of varying difficulty. The research examined three areas: 1) Whether there were differences between educators of toddlers and preschoolers in terms of the frequency and type of questions used. It was predicted that early childhood educators working with preschool-age children would ask more questions, more open-ended questions, and more topic-continuing questions than those working with toddlers. This hypothesis was based on the expectation that the more advanced linguistic and conversational abilities of preschoolers would motivate educators to use more of these question types. 2) Whether preschoolers responded more frequently to these different types of questions than toddlers. It was hypothesized that preschool-age children would respond more often than toddlers.
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Based on previous studies, it was predicted that open-ended questions would elicit more multiword responses from all children than closed questions.
On average, about one third of the educators' utterances were questions for both the toddlers and pre-schoolers. Also, the educators used approximately three times as many closed questions as open-ended questions. In addition, when questions were categorized by topic, educators of toddlers used twice as many questions that initiated new topics in comparison to those that continued the topic of the children's previous utterances. In contrast, pre-school educators were more balanced in terms of questions that continued or initiated topics.
Overall, toddlers responded to approximately 43%
