To assess a child's communicative ability, it is important to develop not only measures of his understanding of vocabulary, but of his understanding of the syntax of language: patterns of words, regularities, and relationships of words in a sentence. Controlled test situations should be established in which the child receives minimal cues from the situation itself. Children should clearly understand the meanings of the words used, and test items should be constructed so correct answers cannot be given unless the child comprehends the syntax being tested. The child is verbally instructed on what to do with toy test materials such as boy and girl dolls, blocks, toy animals, marbles, sticks, and clay. Problems are set up in terms of levels of difficulty. First level items include testing children's understanding of active sentences singular/plural nouns, and possessive noun inflection. Second level items include negative/affirmative statements, and questions, singular/plural with noun and verb inflections, and adjectival modification. Third level problems test for understanding of negative affix, reflexivization, comparatives, passives, and self-embedded sentences. Although the tests of comprehension of syntactic construction have not all been tried or standardized, they are based on linguistic theory, psycholinguistic research, and developmental studies of children's speech. (NH)