Who, why, when, and how: a development study

Fifty children between the ages of 3; 0 and 5; 6 were asked six types of wh - questions following videotaped sequences. It is argued that differential difficulty of various forms of who questions supports a parallel model of information retrieval and processing during discourse. The differential difficulty of why and when questions are, however, attributable to a necessary progression in the ability to encode the relevant concepts linguistically. Responses to how questions are difficult because they involve a number of unrelated skills.