The purpose of this study is to document the development of communicative skills between adolescent mothers and their children. It is hypothesized that teenage mothers and their children will develop different communicative patterns than older mothers and their children; that these patterns will be detected in the early pre-linguistic interactions between mother and infant and when the child is 2 years of age and is in the first stages of speech production. These differences will also be related to the infant's performance on a standard linguistic test and a developmental assessment. These differences will be a function of the mother's age in combination with the family SES, maternal education, maternal verbal intelligence, and child care support. The sample will consist of 50 primiparous, Caucasian mothers from lower to middle class backgrounds who delivered healthy full term newborns. Half of the mothers were 17 years of age or younger at the time of the infant's birth; the other half were 21 years of age or older. At 8 months, mother-infant interaction was videotaped during face-to-face interaction, teaching, and play. These videotapes will be coded to document the mother's and infant's communicative acts. When the infants were 4 and 8 months, the mother was interviewed about her child care support, life stress, and other demographic variables. From these, the family SES, maternal education, child care support, and life stress will be determined. Mother-infant interaction during feeding, play, and teaching was videotaped during a home visit when the child was 2 years of age. These videotapes will be coded using a pre-determined system for both mother and child's communicative acts. In a Follow-up Clinic visit, a complete pediatric, neurologic, and hearing assessment was performed to rule out any physiologic explanation for the individual differences observed in language acquisition in these children. The Mullen Scales of Early Learning were administered to assess linguistic status, along with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Another home visit will be conducted to assess maternal verbal intelligence. The assessment of maternal communicative strategies and infant's language developmental status might provide useful tools to identify infants of teenage mothers at risk for later problems, especially for the acquisition of sociolinguistic skills necessary for performance in school and in intelligence testing.