A Developmental Analysis of the " Psychological " Subject and Predicate of the Sentence

The purpose of this investigation was to study the early development of the distinction between the "psychological" subject and predicate and to determine its relationship to the grammatical subject and predicate distinction. In the first task, kindergarten and 2nd grade subjects were asked to select the most important word in each of several sentences. In the second task, two more groups of children at the same age levels were asked to produce opposites for the same set of sentences. It was found that, whereas the younger children's responses may be accounted for by factors of semantic features of individual words, the older subjects consistently centred on the grammatical predicate as the locus of opposition and most important word. Furthermore, this shift to the predicate in the older children was characterized by an emphasis on the verb.