Research with preschool children has shown that explanations are important to them in that they actively seek explanations in their conversations with adults. But what sorts of explanations do they prefer, and what, if anything, do young children learn from the explanations they receive? Following a preliminary study with adults (N = 67) to establish materials for use with children, we addressed this question using a seminaturalistic methodology. Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 69) were dissatisfied when receiving nonexplanations to their explanatory questions, but they were satisfied when receiving explanations, and their satisfaction varied appropriately across several levels of explanatory information. Moreover, using recall as a measure of learning, whereas children typically failed to recall nonexplanations, their recall of explanatory information was consistently high and also varied appropriately across differing levels of information provided. These results confirm that children not only actively seek informative explanations in their everyday conversational interactions with adults, but they selectively retain the answers they receive.

中文翻译：

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幼儿更喜欢并记住令人满意的解释

对学龄前儿童的研究表明，解释对他们很重要，因为他们在与成年人的对话中积极寻求解释。但是他们更喜欢什么样的解释，年幼的孩子从他们收到的解释中学到了什么？在对成人（N = 67）进行初步研究以建立供儿童使用的材料之后，我们使用半自然主义方法解决了这个问题。4 岁和 5 岁儿童 (N = 69) 在收到对其解释性问题的不解释时不满意，但在接受解释时他们感到满意，并且他们的满意度在几个解释性信息水平上有适当的变化。此外，使用回忆作为学习的衡量标准，而儿童通常无法回忆起非解释，他们对解释性信息的回忆一直很高，并且在提供的不同级别的信息中也有适当的差异。这些结果证实，儿童不仅在与成人的日常对话互动中积极寻求信息解释，而且他们有选择地保留他们收到的答案。