Part of an 18-month longitudinal investigation of mother-child language-teaching interactions, this study describes changes in mothers' use of elicting strategies over time as their children's language became more complex. The focus was the adjustments mothers make to fit their behavior to their child's linguistic skills and development. Samples of interactions between mothers and children videotaped in their homes when the children were 16, 21, 24, and 30 months old were analyzed. Mother utterances eliciting child verbalizations were coded for utterance type (specific form, information option seeking, clarification, or modeling), level of cue or amount of support provided by the utterance, and complexity of the expected child response. Child responses were coded according to their degree of correctness. The results suggest that mother expectations for child responses clearly change over time in relation to development in the child's skills, with decreasing cue support for the child's response, increasing interaction frequency, decrease in likelihood of mothers letting their questions go unanswered, and increasing use of repetition when the child does not respond. Modeling was used most frequently as a first elicitation tactic at 21 months, secondarily at 24 months, and infrequently later. (MSE)