The development of relative clauses in child speech was investigated using an elicited production task instead of spontaneous speech samples. In an elicited production task, the context is manipulated so that a complex sentence must be used for communication. Thirty-six English speaking children from 3 to 5 years old were provided with contexts designed to elicit subject, direct object, and indirect object relative clauses. The elicited production task was highly successful in eliciting accurate descriptions using restrictive relative clauses from young children. The data suggest that age was related to use of different syntactic forms to express restriction, with younger children preferring prepositional phrases and older children using relative clauses. This developmental pattern suggests that the roots of restrictive relative clauses may lie in prepositional phrases. Tables and references are appended. (RW)