The utterance The man fell down because he slipped on a banana peel is a verbal statement in which causation is stated directly, and the major events are not reported in the perceptual order of occurrence. Surprisingly, in retelling 20 ‘stories’, 23 nursery-school children often refused to produce sentences in which causation was stated directly, but readily retold causationimplied utterances; performance was worst for unrelated (control) stories. Moreover, backward temporal order hurt performance only when causation was stated directly. Except for this latter condition, memory was best for the first half of the stories regardless of the temporal arrangement of the clauses. Finally, the majority of the story events were reproduced in the linguistic order in which they had been originally presented.

Pre-school children were required to act out a series of two-event sequences conjoined by either before or after. The sentences to be acted out consisted of either a meaningfully or an arbitrarily ordered sequence of events. Performance was markedly superior for meaningfully ordered sequences. It is suggested that the meanings of before and after must be acquired in situations which provide contextual support, and only then can be applied in situations which do not provide such support.

Children in grades 1–3 (ages 6–9) were asked to retell and explain a series of riddles. The scoring system was developed to differentiate levels of competence. Ability to recall riddles was not found to be predictive of ability to explain them. Three cognitive factors seemed to determine level of riddle competence. Level of competence was NOT clearly related to age. Analysis of riddles yields descriptive attributes that distinguish easy from difficult riddles. Implications concern the relationship of riddle competence to reading ability and metalinguistic facility.

The ability to distinguish ask and tell in Spanish was studied with five groups of native Spanish speakers: adults, 7- and 10-year-olds in a full-bilingual-programme school (BISO), and 7- and 10-year-olds in a non-total BISO school. The interviews included context-present and context-absent items. Differences in these subjects' responses and those elicited by Chomsky (1969) among children acquiring English are explored. Increased age, bilingual schooling, and presence of contextual clues enhanced performance. Relative difficulty of dile and pregúntale, stages in distinguishing these in three types of constructions, and comparisons of first and second language performance are discussed.

Coordinate conjunction was evaluated in early child language with regard to its structural properties. In a series of four studies, 60 two- and three-year-olds grouped by MLU were studied in an elicited imitation task where in the linguistic form of sentences was varied according to conjunction structure (whether sentential or phrasal) and according to pattern of redundancy deletion in conjunction reduction (whether forward or backward in directionality). Both factors were found to affect children's imitation. The results suggested specific constraints on the structure of coordination in child language.

The ability to define words by means of other words, which forms a part of many standardized tests, must be learned by a child. The nature of the ‘definitional task’ and the development of language responses (from children 4; 5 to 7; 5) are discussed in terms of a linguistic analysis of the definitional form and its semantic relations. Progress in definitional strategies by children moves along two continua: conceptually from the individually experiential to the socially shared; and syntactically from actual predicates through hypothetical predicates to adult definitional sentence frames. Implications include novel elicitation techniques, psycholinguistically informed evaluation of direction and scoring measures of some common standardized verbal tests, and better understanding of the range of normal development on one specific language task.