# Children’s questions to people and voice assistants

A TÜBİTAK 3501 project on how social and cultural factors relate to children’s search for information.

## Project scope

Burcu Ünlütabak led this project at Yeditepe University with support from the TÜBİTAK Career Development Program (3501, grant 123K894). The wider project examined how children aged 4 to 8 ask questions when they interact with adults and voice assistants. It also studied how parents’ beliefs and attitudes toward technology relate to children’s questions.

[Yeditepe project description](https://itbf.yeditepe.edu.tr/en/research-projects) · [Bilkent seminar](https://w3.bilkent.edu.tr/www/psyc-semineri-sociocultural-influences-on-childrens-information-seeking-with-humans-and-voice-assistants-burcu-unlutabak-1230-12-subat-2024-en/)

## How we studied questions

The project combined parent interviews and surveys with observations and experiments. The team built a Wizard-of-Oz interface that let an experimenter select a response while a child interacted with a voice assistant. This gave the researchers control over how much information an answer provided.

Onur Bal worked as a research assistant from December 2023 to August 2025. He helped run experiments, built the experiment interface, and developed a workflow to turn recordings into corrected transcripts and coded question data.

[Onur Bal’s research CV](https://onurbal.com/en/about/)

## Research outputs

- **Voice assistant study.** The 2026 preprint by Ünlütabak, Büşra Sarıkaya Güven, Bal, and Zeynep Gedikoğlu reports how 47 children responded to informative and non-informative answers. [Read the study record](/research/children-voice-assistants.md).
- **Social robot study.** Ünlütabak and Duygun Erol Barkana studied the questions children asked a social robot. The 2025 journal article acknowledges the same grant. [Read the related work entry](/research/related-work.md#children-and-social-robots).

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