Previous studies dealing with the age at which children acquire constituent order preferences have been in conflict. This study was designed to determine if children with normal language development demonstrate constituent order preferences as early as age three and one-half, or a mean age of four years, one month. To test this competency, an imitation task was presented to 15 subjects. Four constituent order sentence types were used: subject-verb-object (SVO), subject-object-verb (SOV), object-verb-subject (OVS), and object-subject-verb (OSV). Subjects exhibited fewer errors, shorter repetition times, and shorter lag times on well-ordered sentences than on permuted sentences, demonstrating constituent order preferences at this early age. (Author)