Children museums provide a dynamic environment for families to engage in learning, with exhibits designed to enhance and stimulate caregiver-child interactions (Marcus, 2016; Willard et al., 2019). Additionally, it has been shown that the use of specific types of questions supports narrative development and critical thinking by scaffolding more elaborative responses (Reese and Fivush, 1993). The motivation for this study is to analyze the prosody of wh-questions during caregiver-child interactions in an ecologically valid setting—a children's museum—with the goal of better understanding how the prosody of questions may impact language during learning-based free play. Specifically, we examine wh-questions during 20-min exhibit explorations by 3- to 6-year old children with their caregivers (n = 10). Caregiver and child wh-question prosody is analyzed phonologically (pitch accents and boundary tones) and acoustically (F0). Outcome measures additionally include the overall amount and types of child language produced. We hypothesize that caregiver prosody will be reflected in that of the child, with a correlation between more expressive caregiver prosody and the overall amount of language produced by the child. The broader research aim is to provide strategies to caregivers to increase language output and enhance learning during museum experiences.
