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Recent successes teaching chimpanzees to engage in symbolic communication have again brought into question the Cartesian supposition that language is uniquely possessed by homo sapiens. Despite the very remarkable achievements of Washoe and Sarah, an objective comparison of these chimps' linguistic performances with those of a typical 3-yearold child provides scant evidence for rejecting Descartes' view. An organism uses human language if and only if it uses structures characteristic of those languages. The ability of apes or even 2-year-olds to communicate and use simple names is not sufficient reason to attribute the use of human language to them. The creative or projective aspect of human language cannot be overlooked. Efforts to explain the language deficits of apes in terms of impoverished language experience, anatomical deficits, or cognitive-structure differences are not convincing.

Inferences about linguistic competence in children are typically based on spontaneous speech. This poses a problem since we know that other factors are also involved in speech production. Children who may use complex object and adverbial NPs do not use complex subject NPs. Is this a competence deficit, a performance problem, or simply a reflection of pragmatic factors? Evidence presented here suggests that children probably do not need complex subjects. An extensive use of pronouns in subject but not object position indicates that pragmatics may account for the distribution of clauses in their speech. A similar pattern in adult speech indicates there is no warrant to conclude children's lack of subject clauses reflects anything more than the nature of spontaneous speech.

Research on lateral eye movements has examined personality and cognitive correlates with the hope of establishing such eye movements as a measure of preference for the different modes of information-processing associated with each of the cerebral hemispheres. Unfortunately, a review of this research provides only conflicting, tenuous substantiation for such hypotheses. The present study attempts to resolve the conflict within previous research by investigating the validity of the measure across a variety of tests of cognitive ability and preference, utilizing several procedures for scoring and classifying subjects on the measure. However, evidence for this measure's ability to predict cognitive performance linked to hemispheric specialization--in any of our conditions--was extremely meager. The usefulness of lateral eye movements as a diagnostic tool must be considered highly suspect; despite this fact, the measure may yet prove to be of some theoretical significance.