The study examines the communicative interaction process between two profoundly deaf mothers and their profoundly deaf young children who use American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate. The hypothesis is explored that deaf mothers modify their language when directly addressing their children in the same fashion as hearing mothers. Utterances containing pointing behaviors and modulated verbs were isolated. Findings in phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic domains clearly support the hypothesis that deaf mothers modify and simplify their language in conversation with their deaf babies. Data further supported previous reports that young developing signers do not make use of the inflectional/verb modulation system of the ASL in the early stages of acquisition. Children combined deictic points and lexical signs. Similarly, the mothers did not employ much modulation in their language with their children. Strategies used by mothers included explicit forms of reference to referencing non-present objects, locations, and people through indexic incorporation and verb modulation. (Author/CL)