This study centers on two children from the CHILDES database, Naima and Ethan, whose language development between ages 2 and 3 is characterized by pronoun reversal errors: pronoun ‘you’ was used as if it were ‘I’ and ‘I’ as if it were ‘you’. Interestingly enough, Naima was a normally developing, precocious speaker while Ethan was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (AS). Our central research question is how pronoun-reversing children express meanings interpreted by caregivers as 'commands' (or imperatives), that is, sentences intended to elicit an action from hearers. Imperative constructions such as ‘Let's read that book’ or ‘Get me a raisin' were practically absent from their linguistic repertoire and similar meanings were expressed by utterances containing verbs like want or need (e.g. 'You [=I] need a raisin' or 'You [=I] want to read that book'). We argue that although their utterances are not syntactically expressive of imperative mood, semantically they appear to convey imperative force and act as a syntactic alternative to imperative constructions. This is understood to be the case through an analysis of the contextual responses of the caregivers. Consider the following: Naima tells her mother 'No, you [=I] want smoothie' to which the mother responds 'I’ll get you some' and is seen through the video footage giving Naima a smoothie. Given these kinds of communicative exchanges, an utterance was deemed to convey imperative force only if the caregiver perceived and acted on the desire expressed by the child as shown in the previous example. In English, imperatives are dependent on the precise understanding of the usually implied pronoun ‘you’ and this factor may delay a pronoun-reversing child in the acquisition of adult-like imperative constructions. This study highlights the relevancy of individual child data and additionally offers us an ample perspective of the children’s developing communicative abilities.