Typical times children begin to ask questions, from a lecture at the Medical College of Georgia:
"what" 2 yrs
"where" 2.6 yrs
"who" 3.0 yrs
"whose" 3.0 yrs
"why" 3.0 yrs
"how many" 3.0 yrs
"how" 3 ‐ 6 yrs
"when" 4 yrs
This could be interpreted as either a rough scale of abstractness, or a rough scale of what is most salient and critical. Either way, is it surprising that "when" ends up so late on the list? "What" something is, that we can grasp relatively easily. But our concept of time and how we operate within it, that's something we're still so completely far off from understanding.
I mean, we still have this silly conception of memory as a just big pile of stuff that we can just go back through and pull memories out. Like files from a hard drive. Just silly.
