Children's Developing Ideas About Knowledge and Its Acquisition

Abstract

We review key aspects of young children's concept of knowledge. First, we discuss children's early insights into the way that information can be communicated from informant to recipient as well as their active search for information via questions. We then analyze the way that preschool children talk explicitly and cogently about knowledge and the presuppositions they make in doing so. We argue that all children, irrespective of culture and language, eventually arrive at the same fundamental conception of knowledge in the preschool years. Nevertheless, despite the universality of this basic conception, young children are likely to show considerable variation in their pattern of information seeking, depending on the conversational practices of their family and culture.

Keywords: Conversational practices; Infants; Information seeking; Knowledge; Preschoolers; Testimony; Theory of mind.