A study on children's speech is prefaced by an extensive theoretical discussion. An attempt to construct a taxonomy that captured psychologically real, discrete types of communicative acts in mother-child interactions was based on the insight that verbal utterances are social acts that are meaningful in particular social situations. The taxonomy was formulated from an analysis of mother-infant interactions and a study of sociological theories. The key distinction made in the taxonomy is between the presence and separation of the communicants. Utterances are classified into several types, including: negotiations, markings, evaluations, conversations, performances, acknowledgements, metacommunication, and text editing. In all, the taxonomy distinguishes 65 types of talk. From this taxonomy, other researchers have developed abridged verbal utterance coding systems. The study investigated the possibility that utterances are produced as responses to situations or as expressions of communicative intent. The speech interactions of two samples of Israeli Hebrew-speaking, mother-infant dyads were analyzed. Results indicated that even though infants made more context-embedded utterances at 10 months of age than at 18 months, those utterances accounted for only 30 percent of all utterances. The great majority of children's utterances were independent of the ongoing context. A reference list of 39 items is included. (BC)