In an examination of the acquisition of the spatial syntax of American Sign Language (ASL), 43 children aged 3-10 years were given a range of comprehension and elicitation tests designed to analyze the subsystems involved in the corrrect use of ASL syntax. The subsystems were nominal establishment, verb agreement, and consistency of reference. The results indicate that the acquisition of ASL spatial syntax includes several stages in the learning process as well as several components learned independently. Although verb agreement with present referents is learned relatively early, complete correct verb agreement with non-present referents is learned relatively late in spite of the intermediate accomplishment of comprehension of abstract loci for non-present referents. It is suggested that research on other aspects of the acquisition of the spatial syntactic system and the development of nonlinguistic spatial cognition in deaf and hearing children will shed light on the interplay between spatial and language representation in the visual-spatial modality. (MSE)