ABSTRACT
Both young children and mothers talking to young children use repetition a great deal. Mothers talked to the target children more than did the peers in terms of utterances, turns, word tokens, and word types. The target children's number of utterances per turn was significantly higher with the peer than with the mother. As C. R. Cooper and R. G. Cooper pointed out, children differ along many dimensions and the word peer may imply equality where none exists; the word peer is used generally to refer to children of approximately the same age, and specifically to the partners of the target children. A number of components of the target children's talk were relatively independent of characteristics of the partner's talk. The most notable of these are conversational skills associated with turn taking, that is, responding to and eliciting responses from the partner.
