14 peer dyads were observed longitudinally at 16, 20, 24, 28, and 32 months to assess developmental changes in social coordinations (both action-to-action thematic relations and extended games). Each child's movements through the playroom, actions upon play material, vocalizations, verbalizations, and gestures were coded for their relation to the concurrent or immediately prior behavior of the peer: Unrelated, Tangential, Coordinated, Interfering. There was a marked increase with age in acts coordinated with those of a peer, and imitations of the peer's nonverbal actions accounted for most of the developmental change. The use of words to direct the peer in a coordinated way increased with age but remained infrequent. Developmental change in the frequency of games paralleled that for imitative acts, and imitative acts both established and set the theme for most of the games. Thus, imitating another's nonverbal actions is a core behavioral strategy for achieving social coordinations during the developmental period preceding reliance on verbal communication in peer interaction.

The study reported here was designed to examine linkages between mother-child conversational interactions during events and children's subsequent recall of these activities. In this longitudinal investigation, 21 mother-child dyads were observed while they engaged in specially constructed activities when the children were 30, 36, and 42 months of age. Analyses of the children's 1-day and 3-week recall of these events indicated that at all age points, features of the activities that were jointly handled and jointly discussed by the mother and child were better remembered than were features that were either (1) jointly handled and talked about only by the mother, or (2) jointly handled and not discussed. Potential linkages were also explored between incidental memory for personal experiences and deliberate recall of familiar but arbitrary materials. In this regard, children's recall of the special activities was positively correlated with their recall of objects in a deliberate memory task performed at 42 months.

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To assess the social interactions between unfamiliar peers, 30 pairs of home-reared children-10 pairs in each of three age groups, 10-12, 16-18, and 22-24 months of age-were observed in an unfamiliar play setting with their mothers. The children contacted their mothers little and interacted more with toys and one another, exchanging smiles, vocalizations, and toys and imitating each other's actions. Contact of the same objects and involvement in the peer's activities with objects increased reliably with age. By 2 years of age, social play exceeded solitary play and the social partner was most often the peer. The results suggested that children generalize to peers behaviors developed through child-adult interaction, but that peers provide stimulation differing from that of familiar adults.Scant attention has been paid to the social interactions between children under two years of age, despite the importance attached to early peer interactions by students of nonhuman primates (e.g., Harlow, 1969;Hinde, 1971) and despite repeated observations of human infants exchanging glances, sounds, smiles, and even toys (e.g., Bridges, 1933; Biihler, 1930;Vincze, 1971). Our knowledge of early human sociability remains limited in large measure to child-mother interactions and to children's initial reactions to unfamiliar adults (e.g., Rheingold & Eckerman, 1973;Schaffer, 1971). Yet the interactions between infant peers may mirror the social development occurring through child-adult interaction; and even more important, interactions with peers may contribute in their own right to early social development.The most comprehensive prior study of interactions between children under 2 years of age is that of Maudry and Nekula (1939), conducted in a foundling home over 30 years This research was supported in part by a Duke University Research Council Grant. We thank Deborah Hotch for her services as an observer and Gregory E.