the effect of language proficiency, time, and question types on children’s response accuracy

Within the last few decades a new strand of inquiry in psycholinguistics has focused on the accuracy of children’s responses to various types of questions. findings of these studies are employed in designing questions for a wide range of contexts, from interview sessions, forensic investigations, language assessment, through to pedagogical tests, and clinical settings. the present study was conducted to examine the effect of children’s language proficiency on the accuracy of their responses to different types of forced-choice, yes-no and open-ended questions. the participants consisted of a total of 19 monolingual preschoolers (age range: 42-79 months old) recruited from two kindergartens. the participants’ language proficiency was assessed through employing a persian elicited imitation test developed by mehrani (2017). children were then required to participate in a story narration session, where the researcher read them a short story about a birthday party. attempts were made to keep the participants engaged in the session by exposing them to a number of sequential pictorial illustrations which depicted the story. they were then asked a series of questions about the content of the story, once immediately after the test, and once after an interval of one week. analysis of the results showed significant effects for language proficiency, question types, as well as time elapse. subsequent analyses also showed that children display a compliance tendency in response to yes-no questions, and a recency tendency in response to forced-choice questions. these tendencies however, grew weaker as children’s language proficiency developed. the findings suggest that certain types of questions are not likely to elicit accurate responses, and thus are not recommended in designing language tests and interview questions.