This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the relative ordering of related syntactic structures with regard to time of acquisition. In order to answer these questions, two classes each of first through sixth graders were asked to interpret two types of reflexivized sentences, those that contain a reflexive pronoun indicating an understood identity. Children's interpretations of both sentence types were tested by an interview technique similar to Chomsky's and suggested the following: general linguistic constraints may not necessarily be acquired at uniform maturational levels; the minimal distance principle appears to function as a general syntactic principle, applicable to more than one syntactic structure; and mastery of the first sentence structure develops prior to mastery of the second. (Author/KS)