A developmental study of the pragmatic communication rule for prenominal adjective ordering*

First-, fourth-, and eighth-grade children and college undergraduates indicated preference for either normal or inverted orders of prenominal adjectives (for example,the large red car or the red large car, respectively) to describe a pictorial referent. Preference for the normal order of adjectives first appeared with the fourth graders. When communication context was vaxied by presenting a nonreferent that required a color adjective for discrimination from the referent, college students increased their preference for the inverted order. This separation of the acquisition of a linguistic rule from its utilization in communication was discussed.