1 Pathways Between Maternal Depression and Early Child Language Development in Low-Income Families Elizabeth Spier, American Institutes for Research Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, New York University Barbara Alexander Pan, Harvard University Meredith Rowe, University of Chicago Three findings motivated this study: 1. Mothers living in poverty are at increased risk for depression relative to non-impoverished mothers (Peterson & Albers, 2001). 2. Maternal vocabulary use is positively related to children’s lexical development in low-income families (Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, in press). 3. Depressed mothers speak less to their toddlers than non-depressed mothers. In turn, their children are at increased risk for delays in language development (Murray, Kempton, Woolgar, & Hooper, 1993). The following study was undertaken to examine the relationships between maternal depression, early maternal vocabulary use, and children’s later lexical development in low-income families. It was hypothesized that: 1.Maternal depression would be associated with reduced maternal productive vocabulary. 2.Maternal depression would be negatively associated with the size of children’s productive and receptive vocabularies. 3.Maternal depression would have a significant impact on children’s lexical development due to reduced early maternal vocabulary use. SAMPLE  Participants were 116 mother-toddler pairs from low-income homes who applied for Early Head Start services.  Participants came from two sites, with 66 families from an urban area of the Northeast, and 50 families from a rural area of New England.  Mothers ranged in age from 14 to 43 years at time of child’s birth (M = 23 years 1 month, SD = 7 years, 5 months).  Almost half (43.9%) of the urban mothers had given birth prior to their 18 th birthday, but only 8.0% of the rural mothers had.  Participating children were 63 (54.3%) boys and 53 (45.7%) girls.