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Combinatorial abilities in language and elicited symbolic play were compared in a longitudinal study of 30 children at 20 and 28 months. At 20 months, group descriptive statistics for lengths of utterances and elicited symbolic play sequences were comparable, whereas by 28 months longer utterances (in morphemes) were produced than symbolic play sequences. This modality shift apparently reflects the acquisition of productive morphology. In addition, multivariate analyses were used to assess the stability of individual differences. Play measures were chosen to represent potentially separable contributions to multiword speech: vocabulary, structural limits on the length of combinations, and ordering. No language-gesture relationships were observed at 28 months. At 20 months, however, mean length of utterance as well as composite scores representing "referential" and "grammatical morpheme" language interview measures were predicted by combinatorial sequences involving object substitutions in play. Different symbolic play variables contributed unique explained variance to different language variables. Parallels to the passage from single to multiword speech have been suggested in several areas of development: imitation (McCall,

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