Questions may be asked with an intent to acquire new information from the recipient (i.e., information-seeking questions) or with the intent to teach (i.e., pedagogical questions). Understanding how the questions’ recipients infer the intent of questions is important, because the recipients’ inferences have important consequences for reasoning and learning. In the present series of studies, we tested the hypothesis that i) askers use prosodic cues—an ever-present signal—to encode information-seeking and pedagogical intent both in deliberate and spontaneous speech and that ii) adults and children can draw appropriate inferences about the question’s intent on the basis of prosody alone. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that naïve adult listeners and children aged 5 years and above have the capacity to explicitly identify which asker has an intention to teach on the basis of prosody alone. In Experiment 3, we found that parents’ spontaneous speech in pedagogical or information-seeking contexts is appropriately recognized by naïve listeners as pedagogical or information-seeking. Thus, the intent of pedagogical and information-seeking questions is acoustically encoded by askers, and it can be appropriately decoded by recipients.

Self-directed exploration in childhood appears driven by a desire to resolve uncertainties in order to learn more about the world. However, in adult decision-making, the choice to explore new information rather than exploit what is already known takes many factors beyond uncertainty (such as expected utilities and costs) into account. The evidence for whether young children are sensitive to complex, contextual factors in making exploration decisions is limited and mixed. Here, we investigate whether modifying uncertain options influences explore-exploit behavior in preschool-aged children (48–68 months). Over the course of three experiments, we manipulate uncertain options’ ambiguity, expected value, and potential to improve epistemic state for future exploration in a novel forced-choice design. We find evidence that young children are influenced by each of these factors, suggesting that early, self-directed exploration involves sophisticated, context-sensitive decision-making under uncertainty.

In studies involving human subjects, voluntary participation may lead to sampling bias, thus limiting the generalizability of findings. This effect may be especially pronounced in developmental studies, where parents serve as both the primary environmental input and decision maker of whether their child participates in a study. We present a novel empirical and modeling approach to estimate how parental consent may bias measurements of children’s behavior. Specifically, we coupled naturalistic observations of parent–child interactions in public spaces with a behavioral test with children, and used modeling methods to impute the behavior of children who did not participate. Results showed that parents’ tendency to use questions to teach was associated with both children’s behavior in the test and parents’ tendency to participate. Exploiting these associations with a model-based multiple imputation and a propensity score–matching procedure, we estimated that the means of the participating and not-participating groups could differ as much as 0.23 standard deviations for the test measurements, and standard deviations themselves are likely underestimated. These results suggest that ignoring factors associated with consent may lead to systematic biases when generalizing beyond lab samples, and the proposed general approach provides a way to estimate these biases in future research.