Children's apparent ‘errors’ in interpreting ask as tell, incidentally uncovered in C. Chomsky's research on syntactic development, and subsequently interpreted in terms of E. Clark's theory of semantic development, are re-interpreted in the framework of pragmatic development. An experiment is reported in which a single coherent discourse framework is imposed and one pragmatic factor is manipulated: children's knowledge of the answers to the questions they are supposed to relay. The results confirm the hypothesis that if the children do not know the information, they relay the question, i.e. ask. If they do know the answer, they supply it, i.e. tell. By literally asking, the children in the ‘don't know’ condition demonstrate that they are capable of decoding ask constructions semantically and syntactically. The tendency of the children in the ‘know’ condition to tell is then interpreted as revealing not semantic confusion but pragmatic skill. The children's responses are discussed in relation to three-person speech acts and indirect requests for information. Children's ability to interpret utterances non-literally has implications for conducting experiments with literal instructions and these are also discussed.

Previous research indicates young children are likely to interpret the surface-structure subject of a sentence as the deep subject regardless of syntax, e.g. John is chosen as subject of both John is easy to please and John is eager to please. However, with one-noun sentences, the task required both recognizing a difference between the sentences and inferring an implied noun. Thus an inability to make an inference might be responsible for the children's consistency in choosing the surface subject. Two experiments compared kindergarteners' interpretations of one- and two-noun sentences. With two-noun sentences (i.e. John is easy for Jim to please), which explicitly stated the surface object, consistency in choosing the surface subject decreased.

Children aged 7; 6 to 10; 0 were required to solve 2-term relational problems in order to explore developmental changes in the comprehension of Italian positive and negative comparatives. The results indicate that at first children spatially represent the two terms of the positive comparatives in a contrastive-positional way, while in the second phase children represent the terms relationally. Comprehension of negative comparatives is characterized by three phases: a contrastive-positional phase, a presuppositional phase and a relational representation. The older subjects were subsequently divided into two groups based on their previous performance, and required to solve 3-term series problems in order (a) to confirm and extend the result of the first experiment; (b) to examine whether the linguistic comprehension of the comparative was a sufficient and necessary prerequisite for solution of 3-term problems. The developmental sequence of comprehension of comparatives was confirmed. Furthermore, the results suggested how cognitive load in making transitive inferences is influenced by linguistic encoding. The data are discussed in the light of a linguistic model versus a spatial representation model. A developmental version of a spatial representation model is proposed to account for the results.