This study investigated the earliest manifestations of verb tense and agreement in English-speaking children, using longitudinal data on the language of four children aged 1:6 to 3:5 years, drawn from a child-language database. Analysis focused on one aspect of inflectional phrase (IP), the children's use of the verbs "be" and "do" forms to mark agreement, and the ending "-ed" and instances of "did" as tense markers. Results show that tense and agreement do not emerge simultaneously, and furthermore, that there is a specific sequence in order of acquisition across English-speaking children: namely, tense appears before agreement. Findings are considered in the context of several approaches to language acquisition and current theories of syntactic structure. It is concluded that: (1) results provide empirical support for the syntactic structure of the language and in particular, the split-inflectional hypothesis, and (2) among current approaches to language acquisition, the continuity hypotheses lend themselves best to interpretation of these results. (MSE)