When a person encounters a problem, the character, form, and content of his or her response provides psychologists with useful and interesting information about processes of challenge and their relationship to intellectual development. In essence, challenge is a developing relationship that is defined on the one hand by objective factors (a person and a problem), and on the other hand by subjective factors (the person's attitude that considers the problem as a challenge). This concept was illustrated by case studies in which two five-year-olds were asked to enact the event of going grocery shopping for a birthday party. The two subjects, during individual testing, played the role of the "customer" and bought groceries, while the experimenter played an undirective role as the store "clerk." Each child was faced with the problem of having to determine which items to select and which to reject. The children's spontaneous verbal and nonverbal activity was recorded on videotape for analysis. The speech utterances were coded according to six different functional types: (1) word play and repetition, (2) emotional exclamations, (3) issuing commands to objects, (4) describing one's own activity, (5) questioning and answering oneself, and (6) verbalizing plans and thoughts. The analyses demonstrated that children not only respond to their own questions by supplying themselves with answers but also respond to intellectual challenges by supplying themselves with questions, thus narrowing down the problem and deflating the challenge. (HOD)