Young children use causal knowledge to guide question asking

Question asking is essential for learning in childhood. But options for possible questions are nearly infinite. We investigate whether causal knowledge might serve as a guiding constraint. Children (5-7 years old, N = 144, 51% female, 49% White, data collected 2022-2024) heard about an event and asked questions to try to identify its cause. Even the youngest children readily deployed their real-world causal knowledge to select better questions (Experiment 1) and generate their own questions from scratch (Experiment 2). Children's grasp of efficient question-asking improved with age. This study provides initial evidence that young learners successfully employ conceptual knowledge to ask good questions within a defined information search problem, and provides insight into how learners arrive at relevant ideas given nearly infinite possibilities.