A study of children's egocentrism in their use of person and case examined whether 7-year-olds would tend to cast themselves as subjects in sentences using the verbs "give, show, say, tell, and lend," and what role they might assign the hearer. In 85 utterances, the children (N=17), with an average age of 7.8 years, showed the expected tendency toward self-mention, with 93 direct references to self as verb arguments. Of the 42 verb arguments not related to the self, 38 percent were explicitly related to ego (e.g., my house, my mother). These findings suggest that the child's world is centered on himself first, and secondly on persons related to the child or things belonging to him or her. Examination of dative and accusative case usage found that the self never appeared as accusative and no accusative was animate, but of the accusatives and prepositional verb modifiers, almost a quarter were explicitly related to ego. Few references were made to the hearer. However, a significant sex difference in preferred case-role for ego emerged: boys tended to refer to themselves as subjects more often than as datives, while girls referred to themselves more frequently as datives than subjects. Gender preference was also found in mention of peers. Nine figures are included. (MSE)