A sample of 48 middle and lower class kindergarten and second grade students participated in a study to determine what speech adjustments school-age children made for listeners of different ages. Half the second grade subjects learned about two performance tasks--a board game and constructing columns of colored blocks--from the researcher, after which they taught the game and directed the construction task to the other second grade students and to kindergarten students during separate situations. The speaker/leaders were recorded and analyzed for differences across listener types, including mean length of utterances, developmental sentence scores, and type token ratios for lexical diversity variations of adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and prepositions. The statistical analyses of the data indicated that neither the total number of utterances nor mean length of utterances of the second grade speakers varied as the listener changed from peer to kindergartener. Significant differences were found between middle and lower class speakers for use of syntax; lower class second grade speakers used a greater variety of syntax when speaking to kindergarten students than to peers, and they used a greater number of adjectives in their speech to peers than to kindergarten students. (These results are discussed for their implications to classroom organizational patterns.) (RL)