Revision behaviors in the speech of normal children were investigated. The subjects were 18 children, six at Brown’s Language Stages I, II, and III. During the collection of a one-hour spontaneous language sample from each child the experimenter pretended 20 times not to understand and asked, “What?” The results indicate a significantly greater use of revisions than repetitions or no responses at each stage and significant differences among the types of revisions observed across stages. These findings are related to current language models.

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The normal course of children's development of social competence from preschool through high school levels is reviewed, and its relationship with developing language skills is discussed. Peer aspects of developing social competence, particularly those relating to friendship development and the development of interpersonal understanding, are highlighted.

The structure of contingent query sequences within adult–child discourse was examined. The children, aged 1; 11–3; 0 in language stages I–III, demonstrated basic knowledge of the contingent query. Implications for conceptualizations of the young child's communicative competence and for theoretical formulations of the query sequence itself are discussed.

Complex syntactic structures may be difficult to recognize when produced using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems that do not contain grammatical markers. The present study investigated adult English speakers' production of Subject and Object relative clause sentences using a picture/symbol-based AAC system with speech output. Most participants avoided the potential ambiguity that resulted from the absence of grammatical markers. They followed spoken English word order when encoding Object relative clause sentences, but altered this order for Subject relative clause sentences. Most participants used constituent proximity to maintain the distinction between Subject and Object relative clause sentences. Results indicate the combined effects of underlying syntactic knowledge and pragmatic variables on the AAC constituent order patterns observed.