A phenomenon called "pragmatic variation" is discussed as a child's individual system of behavior in response to a question the child doesn't understand but realizes that he must verbalize an answer to. (NCR)

As a step toward developing more controlled studies into children's language, this study attempted to develop standard stimuli to elicit eight basic sentence patterns from kindergarten children. Four stimuli were developed for each pattern. Each stimulus consisted of a stick-figure picture, a description of the picture, and a question or direction…