The purpose of this study was to analyze the speech of mothers and fathers as they interacted with their children in a similar setting. Specifically, the study compared mothers' and fathers' speech patterns in interactions with their preschool children, focusing on utterance length, sentence types, and word frequencies. Speech samples were obtained from 35 days of audiotape and videotape recordings of spontaneous conversations between 28 mothers and 28 fathers and their nursery school children as the parents accompanied their children to and from nursery school classrooms. Results indicated that while both mothers and fathers shorten the mean length of utterance in order to accommodate the language needs of their children, fathers used significantly more interrogative sentences than did mothers and mothers used significantly more declarative sentences than did fathers. In addition, fathers were found to use significantly more words of lower frequency than did mothers. (MP)