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We conducted two studies investigating the status of control principles in children's grammars. In the first, 20 children ranging in age from 3;9 to 5;4 acted out and gave judgments on sentences containing control in complement and adverbial clauses. We found some children with a grammar type in which PRO has arbitrary reference, as well as children with the grammar types previously attested in the literature. We also found some children whose grammars apparently had a coreference requirement for adverbial clauses, causing pronouns to behave like PRO in such constructions. The second study longitudinally explored the findings of the first with 14 children, initially aged 4; 1 to 4; 10. The results of the second study comported with and elaborated on those of the first. We attempt to characterize the children's grammar types in terms of Universal Grammar and to account for how the grammar types change.

There are important developmental changes in noun phrase elaboration in the elementary school years as children learn to manage narrative contexts. Even within picture tasks, variations in visual depiction can affect the use of elaborated noun phrases (ENPs), with more descriptive language more likely to occur in narratives based on a single picture fantasy context than on a realistic picture sequence context. Performance expectations for types of ENPs within these contexts are provided. These findings will be useful to school clinicians in evaluating and working on narrative language within the elementary school period.

Fifty children between the ages of 3; 0 and 5; 6 were asked six types of wh- questions following videotaped sequences. It is argued that differential difficulty of various forms of who questions supports a parallel model of information retrieval and processing during discourse. The differential difficulty of why and when questions are, however, attributable to a necessary progression in the ability to encode the relevant concepts linguistically. Responses to how questions are difficult because they involve a number of unrelated skills.