First published in 1977, this book draws together various contributions on the area of speech used by parents with their children.

Preface Catherine E. Snow and Charles A. Ferguson; Part I. Maternal Speech Styles: 1. Mothers' speech research: from input to interaction Catherine E. Snow; 2. The adaptive significance of linguistic input to prelinguistic infants Jacqueline Sachs; 3. Some prosodic and paralinguistic features of speech to young children Olga K. Garnica; 4. Some interactional aspects of language acquisition Ton van der Geest; 5. Mother, I'd rather do it myself: some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style Elissa L. Newport, Henry Gleitman and Lila R. Gleitman; 6. Mothers' speech adjustments: the contribution of selected child listener variables Toni G. Cross; 7. Beyond syntax: the influence of conversational constraints on speech modifications Marilyn Shatz and Rochel Gelman; 8. Talking to children: some notes on feedback Jen Berko Gleason; Part II. Baby-Talk Registers and Cross-Cultural Perspectives: 9. Baby talk as a simplified register Charles A. Ferguson; 10. Modifications of speech addressed to young children in Latvian Velta R¿¿e-Dravi¿a; 11. The derivational processes relating Berber nursery words to their counterparts in normal inter-adult speech Jim Bynon; 12. Participant deixis in English and baby talk Dorothy Davis Wills; 13. Ethnography and caretaker-child interaction Ben G. Blount; 14. Aspects of social environment and first language acquisition in rural Africa Sara Harkness; Part III: 15. A sociologist's point of view Allen D. Grimshaw; 16. A psychologist's point of view Susan Ervin-Tripp; References; Annotated bibliography Elaine S. Andersen.