Bilingual and monolingual children were presented with experimental conditions where response mode and semantic information was varied. Forty children, 20 in each language-type group, responded in the present progressive and the past tenses to a series of colored drawings of simple activities. Half of the subjects responded to the task under conditions of verbal cues that made specific references to the time the activity took place. The other half responded to the task without the presence of the cues. Results revealed highly significant differences on tense performance, a finding attributed to the structural and semantic differences of the two tenses involved. Bilingual and monolingual children differed significantly in the way they utilized the verbal cues, suggesting that production does not represent the bilingual child's competence in the second language. (Author/CLK)