There are some errors that I think of as characteristic of "hothousing" -- maybe like a hothoused plant raised under badly placed lamps which can never grow to maturity because it over-stretched. Anyway, things where the adult seems more interested in the performance of the answer rather than their own interest in the topic, and is not very concerned about accuracy.
In my area, a kid is as likely to be pop-quizzed on some random aspect of what they're looking at as said "hello" to. My skin just CRAWLS when DS gets asked "what sound does a cat make" out of the blue, just because there were animals tangentially present in something, like a cat in the background of a photo or whatever.
I tend to think of it as hothousing becasue there's one "correct" answer, and it's pretty darned clear to me that there is more than one correct answer. DS liked "Dogs" by Sandra Boynton, and he still gets the funniest (subtle, I have to admit) look on his face when asked "what sound does a dog make." He regularly answers "lalala" for the pig question... also a Boynton reference.
The same is true of "what shape?" "what colour?" etc. These are almost always ambiguous in real life. DS once said "parrallelogram" for a square, which the asker totally didn't get (took me a while, too). I remember a cartoon where the parent was carefully trying to explain a caveman to her son while the son sounded out "australopithicus africanus... Homo Ergaster..." etc.
The other problem with this kinda quizzing is that it interfears in normal socialization and relationship-building, since people do it to the exclusion of saying "hello," "what are you looking at?" "that looks interesting" and other open-ended conversation starters.
Another similar type of thing is when people over-reach their own knowledge to "teach..." after a recent train-viewing trip, DS corrected someone "that's not the snokesnack [sic] that is the frottle [sic -- throttle] dome." Wanna make a bet the asker did NOT get that one. He got carefully corrected "yeeeesssss, That's the SMOKESTACK!!!" And quizzed until he relented and called it the snokesnack. I pointed out he'd been right to him, and he just said "I know." <sigh>
Sorry about the bad writing, I'm too tired to clean it up. But I had a different perspective, so had to put it out there. I'm just like that.
-Mich
