This study will examine the social development of children 2-7 through the means of studying the evolution of children's discourse with each other and with caretaker adults. The communicative strategies employed by participants in the discourse will be examined as a function of their purposes and the structure of the discourse and surrounding context. The resulting generalizations will be tested as instances of rule-governed behavior by means of appropriateness (grammaticality) tests, comprehension tests, and subjective reaction tests inferring the social meaning or the social features of participants and contexts. These tests will employ features of the discourse in context, contrasting alternative forms which are in agreement or disagreement with the hypothesized rule. For young children the relation between discourse structure and syntactic skills will be specifically examined.