To identify specific dimensions of communicative disturbances among adults and children in abusive/neglecting families, 10 mother/child pairs from problem families were matched with 10 control pairs. Each mother was videotaped with her 4- to 15-year-old child for 15 minutes while playing a game under nonstressful conditions. Subjects' conversations were taped and coded for structural/functional type (i.e., bid, response, comment), aggravation/mitigation, discontinuities of topic, interruptions, and disagreements or differences of opinion. It was hypothesized that the usual psycholinguistic constraints of the listener upon the speaker, in which speaker's utterances tend to reflect listener's speech and are fashioned to optimize listener's positive response, would be altered in maltreating pairs of mothers and children. Specifically, in comparison with nonmaltreating families, maltreating family interaction was expected to exhibit more instances of aggravated utterances, fewer instances of mitigated utterances, less conversational cohesion, and more maternal control of the conversation. Results indicate that markers of communicative disturbance can be identified in the ordinary unstressed conversational interactions between maltreating mothers and their children. An index based on aggravation/mitigation, conversational cohesion, and maternal control was able to differentiate between maltreating mothers and children and matched controls. (RH)