A study investigated the use of pronoun and demonstrative reference and ellipsis as cohesive devices in conversation between interlanguage-speaking parents, their children, and the children's classmates. The 24 subjects included eight Italian-, Greek-, and Macedonian-speaking migrant parents, their primary-school-age children, and the children's classmates, matched for language, teacher-assessed ability, and sex. The parents were all second language or interlanguage speakers whose English showed linguistically deviant forms with varying density. The language corpus consisted of responses in interviews concerning attitudes toward schooling, bilingualism, use of languages other than English in and outside the home, sociocultural identity, and multiculturalism in Australia. It was found that the subjects made ample use of ellipsis rather than pronoun or demonstrative reference for making replies cohesive. The groups differed in their ability to produce morphosyntactically and pragmatically well-formed replies, with the parents the least competent in this, followed by the children and classmates. These and other results suggest a weak parental influence on the cohesiveness of children's speech in dyadic exchanges and a need for special attention to cohesive devices in primary school language and general curricula. Numerous tables and a bibliography are appended. (MSE)