Seven children aged 21 to 33 months were taped while they interacted with adults. Transcripts of each session were examined for utterances containing "and,""because,""but,""then," and "so.""And" was the first conjunction produced by all children, followed by "because.""So" was the last conjunction produced, and was used to mean both "in order that" and "therefore." These results support previous findings. The second major finding of the study was that many aspects of the order of acquisition could be explained or better understood when discourse usage was taken into account. Thus, for example, each conjunction exhibited a discourse role insofar as it was, initially at least, primarily a connector within the child's own speech or with an adult utterance. This finding illustrates the complexity of factors--syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic--operating in the acquisition of one system in language. (JB)