Ideas & Findings

A report in the September 1994 issue of Developmental Psychology reveals the complexities behind how children develop the ability to identify sentence subjects.

As part of the reading study, the university researchers spent two years following 48 5-year-olds. At the start of the study, half of the children were a few weeks too young to enter kindergarten, and the other half were able to start school. Over the course of the study, the researchers periodically asked the children to identify subjects in as many as 96 sentences.

The results: Even before they started school, most of the children could name a simple subject in a sentence. They had trouble, though, when the subjects were pronouns or when they consisted of...