subject-verb agreement

[Simonasss]

Hi,
Why is it so difficult for children who begin learning English to make the agreement between subject and verb? Does anyone made any study concerning the subject-verb agreement?
thanks...

[Jamie (K)]

If you're talking about children learning their native language, it's because small children hear the most obvious things first. That's probably also the reason with children learning a second language.

For native English-speaking children learning their first language, in regard to verbs, the first thing they learn is the present participles, because those relate to things they see happening at the same time they hear the verbs. Then they learn the irregular past-tense verbs, because those are easy to hear. The regular past tense and present-tense subject verb agreement are harder to hear, and so those come very late in their language acquisition.

It all has to do with how many prominent features of the language are filling one's attention. At lower stages of development, less prominent things, like verb suffixes, are crowded out by more major things like stems.