A fiddle teacher at the Cascadia Irish music workshop last week mentioned that while his adult students learn tunes more easily in chunks of 2-4 measures, his kids have no need for (or patience with) that. They want the whole tune at once.
I think what's behind that is that adults are so used to having things in logical patterns they get so they can't absorb things any other way, while children have to deal with heaps of apparently arbitrary events all the time, so they're used to it.