{"doi":"10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01718","title":"Family Conversations About Heat and Temperature: Implications for Children’s Learning","abstract":"Some science educators claim that children enter science classrooms with a conception of heat considered by physicists to be incorrect, and speculate that “misconceptions” may result from the way heat is talked about in everyday language (e.g., Lautrey & Mazens, 2004; Slotta & Chi, 2006). We investigated talk about heat in naturalistic conversation to explore the claim that children often hear heat discussed as a substance rather than a process, potentially hindering later learning of heat as energy involved in emergent processes. We explored naturalistic speech among children and adults to understand the nature and frequency of heat- and temperature-related conversations that young children are involved in. This study aims to investigate the actual linguistic resources that children have available, as part of a sociocultural approach to cognitive development. Parents’ everyday conversations about heat and temperature with their 2- to 6-year-old children were drawn from the CHILDES language database and from a parent-child book-reading study. Parents used the word heat rarely, but did so in ways that implied it is a substance. Parents never talked about heat as an emergent process, but sometimes as a direct causal process. Most of the heat- and temperature-related talk, however, focused on words like hot and cold to describe temperature as a property of objects. This investigation of what young children actually experience in everyday conversations is a step toward studying how everyday language may play a role in children’s understanding of heat and temperature.","journal":"Frontiers in Psychology","year":2020,"id":82911,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":12,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.952,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":426917,"name":"Maureen A. Callanan","orcid":"0000-0003-2676-4001","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":427614,"name":"Megan R. Luce","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":93,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:53:48.608934Z","pmid":"33013498","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}