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Children were tested for their comprehension of four types of sentences with relative clauses, in order to determine the role of the following factors in comprehension: (a) position of the embedded clause, (b) word order in the embedded clause, (c) grammatical functions of the identical noun phrases. The results indicate that if the identical noun phrases have the same function in their respective clauses the sentence is significantly easier to understand. The nonsignificant effects of the position of the embedded clause and of the word order in the relative clause disconfirm a putative universal of language acquisition, which has recently been proposed by Slobin. The Parallel Function Hypothesis is proposed to account for our findings, and the implications that it has for the grammar of adult English are considered.