A one-year longitudinal study of the language socialization of three two-year-old children from a white working-class community. The book contains a review of some literature on child language and its correlations with social class, a discussion of the method followed, a picture of the subjects under inquiry, a quantitative analysis of the various types of direct instructions found in the conversational materials, an analysis of meaning in the children's early utterances, and a concluding chapter with some general considerations on this type of research.