i think encoding and decoding has a lot to do with it. we can watch a Disney movie and I'll ask my 4yo what it was about and she can name the main character but

i think encoding and decoding has a lot to do with it. we can watch a Disney movie and I'll ask my 4yo what it was about and she can name the main character but without prompting can't tell you where they went or why. Those phony sounding assignments of "what i did over summer vacation" don't seem so useless now. Right now we're getting lots of imaginative story fragments but missing a coherent narrative linking one sentence to the next. It's interesting watching them play with language and learn how stories work in real time