The Influence of Different Parent-Child Dialogue Types on Preschoolers' Schema Accommodation

Abstract

Within research on early childhood cognitive development, schema accommodation—a core Piagetian construct—refers to the cognitive restructuring process through which individuals revise existing schemas or form entirely new ones when encountering information that contradicts their prior knowledge. This mechanism is essential for cognitive growth, as it enables the child to resolve conflicts between entrenched mental frameworks and novel experiences. For instance, a child who initially believes that "all flying things are birds" must adjust that criterion after discovering that bees fly but are not birds. This adjustment involves not merely adding new facts but fundamentally altering the classification rule, thus exemplifying accommodation as a deep reorganization of the original cognitive structure, rather than simple assimilation. This study explores how questioning-based and descriptive-only parent-child dialogue affect preschoolers' schema accommodation and its age differences. Forty children aged 3–5 joined a randomized pretest-posttest experiment. Results show questioning-based dialogue better promotes schema accommodation, especially for 4–5-year-olds, and guides children to focus on functional features. The findings offer evidence-based guidance for parents' daily cognitive guidance.