The linguistic environment of the child was largely taken for granted by the generative grammarians of the 1960's because of their emphasis on innate ideas as a basis for first language acquisition. Only recently have researchers studied the child's environment linguistically, indicating that not only are adults sensitive to and affected by the need to communicate with their children, but that interaction patterns between parent and child change according to the increasing language skill of the child. These interaction patterns are linguistically summarized here in terms of their syntactic and stylistic features. Such features include sentence complexity, number of transformations involved, types of sentences addressed to the child, the use of repetition, modeling, correcting, baby talk register, and the speed of delivery. All of these features are correlated with the age of the child, but many relationships are still unexplored and questions unresolvEd. If the current trend of research continues, our outlook on the role of parental input in the process of first language acquisition may change quite drastically.