The purpose of this research program is to develop an intervention study for high risk retardation-prone children. They will be evaluated longitudinally for a three to five year period across a number of developmental dimensions of physical health, family status, and a variety of information processing skills. High risk children and families are identified before the child's birth and assigned to experimental and comparison groups, after birth. The experimental group begin at six weeks, an eight hour a day intervention program designed to stimulate language development, task oriented behavior and generally provide an enriched learning environment. The comparison group obtains some nutritional assistance and health care but is provided with no comparable learning experience. Investigators in the programmatic research will study a variety of potential linkages in early child development including the influence of physical health to child learning capabilities, the stimulation of early vocal behavior, the role of the family in the evolution of task oriented behavior, and developmental factors influencing stimulus selection and cognitive style. Multivariate analysis on successive measurements will form the base of analysis of this program of research. This programmatic research should yield more extensive data regarding the progressive developmental interaction in children from early infancy than any existing or previous research. BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES: Ramey, Craig, T., Mills, Pamela, and Campbell, Frances A. Infants' home environments: a comparison of high-risk families and families from the general population. In "American Journal of Mental Deficiency," Vol. 80, 1975, 72-74. Ramey, Craig T., Holmberg, Margaret C., Sparling, Joseph, J., and Collier, Albert M. An introduction to the Carolina Abecedarian Project. In Bettye M. Caldwell (Ed.) "Infant Education," Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center Monographs, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1975.