Maternal directives to children aged 10 and 18 months were analysed with respect to both verbal and concomitant nonverbal aspects. The findings emphasize the multimodal nature of mothers' communicative messages and draw attention to the way in which language occurs in an action context and not as an isolated output. No indication was found for this age range that verbal devices come to replace nonverbal ones. At both ages most utterances were accompanied by some form of nonverbal behaviour; the precise nature of the association, however, gives little support to the idea of parallel coding. The child's own behaviour is also shown to form part of the context in which maternal speech takes place.