The following study expands Denham and Auerbach's (1995, "Mother-child dialogue about emotions and preschoolers' emotional competence." "Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs," 121, 313-337) findings, demonstrating a link between mothers' talk about emotions and preschoolers' knowledge of emotions. We investigate the maternal language and child emotion knowledge association by analysing all maternal questioning, not just questions specifically about emotions, during a mother-child interaction task. Questions are functionally different from other features of language because questions push children to think and formulate their own thoughts about the content, in our case, emotions, in order to generate an appropriate response. Twenty-eight transcripts of mother-child dialogue during a wordless storybook task with emotionally salient content were coded for mothers' use of questions. Results show that mothers' use of questions was associated with emotion knowledge, but only for girls. Our findings show how emotions are socialised differently for boy and girls and the potential importance that questions play in scaffolding girls' attainment of emotion knowledge and overall emotional competence. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)