Primary grade children's memory for parts of speech

Developmental differences in elementary school (kindergarten, first and second grade) children's free recall for parts of speech were investigated using sentences with normal and scrambled word order. The children were presented four sentences with normal syntax and four sentences with scrambled word order. There were significant effects of age, syntax, and rate of presentation; these replicated previous research. The unusual finding was that the kindergarten children, when presented with scrambled word strings, recalled more verbs than either the first or second grade children. It was hypothesized that this occurred because either the kindergarten children failed to detect the scrambled nature of syntaxless strings, or there is a change in the comprehension strategies which de-emphasizes the role of the verb.