[R-sig-ME] how to estimate R- and G-side random effects of GLMM in R

[ts p]

Hello, everyone,

I am not very familiar to use R.
I used SAS Proc GLIMMIX to estimate R- and G-side random effects of 
generalized linear mixed models. But the procedure can just use PQL or MQL. 
Now I want to lmer function in R to estimate GLMM because it can use Laplace 
approximation. It is more precise than PQL or MQL. But I read the manual of 
lmer. I did not find the information how to write a covariance structure in 
the function and how the function can know the struction is for R- or G-side 
random effects.

For example, if I use the following SAS proc GLIMMIX code to estimate a 
model, I wonder who can tell me how to use lmer to write R code to estimate 
the same model.

proc glimmix ;
    class person group item;
    model score(event='1')=item group /noint dist=binary link=logit s;
    random _residual_ / sub=person type=cs ;
run;

Thanks a lot!

P. T. Shu