Predicting what questions people ask

Summary A rewrite-rule text grammar was used to predict question asking. Subjects were instructed to write a text according to a known format, i.e., a police report calling for witnesses to an accident, but first they had to find out what had occurred by asking questions. Each question was answered immediately. The results indicate that the established text grammar predicted the content of the questions well, but did not predict their sequence. Deviations from the predictions are discussed in terms of question-asking strategies as evolved from a text grammar.