The preschool literacy gap is one of the most difficult challenges for education in the US. Children in the lowest SES (Socio-Economic Status) quar-tile have less than half the working vocabulary of those in the top quartile at age 3. On the other hand, preschool children are incessantly inquisitive, and will readily engage in question answering and asking activities if given the opportunity. We argue here that question asking/answering technologies can play a major role in early literacy. We describe the early evaluation of a conversational agent, with the goal of engaging children in a 20-questions game. Towards this goal, we conducted a feasibility study to determine if childrens questions are on-topic and suitable for ASR/dialogue systems. We evaluated the agents performance at conducting a game of 20-questions against that of a human partner.
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