AbstractAn intervention programme, to facilitate children's use of Agent + Action + Object sentences and based around specially made toys, was designed to encompass recent thinking on children's natural language acquisition, in particular the importance of providing a linguistically responsive environment. Two groups of children were involved. One group only played with the toys but the other received sentence models in response to their play actions. Rather surprisingly both groups showed improvements on post‐training assessments and these were maintained four weeks later. It is argued that children must be capable of understanding and identifying relationships among people, objects and events before they can use sentence structuring rules generatively. In future, language intervention programmes should focus more on developing such understanding and rather less on eliciting speec