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The first descriptions of mothers' speech to young children were undertaken in the late sixties in order to refute the prevailing view that language acquisition was largely innate and occurred almost independently of the language environment. The results of those mothers' speech studies may have contributed to the widespread abandonment of this hypothesis about language acquisition, but a general shift of emphasis from syntactic to semantic-cognitive aspects of language acquisition would probably have caused it to lose its central place as a tenet of research in any case. It is thus important to point out that even the very first mothers' speech studies, those most concerned with refuting the innatist view of the language input, were relevant to several other important issues, and contributed to the general acceptance of significant new ideas about language acquisition. I think it is valuable to identify these issues, and to touch upon the research findings relevant to them, precisely because they will shape the future of research in the field of language input. Very briefly, since I will return to them again and again in the course of this paper, I would like to mention three basic assumptions about language acquisition whose acceptance has been furthered by the results of mothers' speech research: