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The study examined the types of mistakes children make during conversations with a familiar partner. The current investigation differs from previous studies because it asked what it is about the language of children with specific language impairment and phonological disorder (SLI:PD) that causes mothers to ask for clarification. Videotaped interactions were coded with the Breakdown Coding System to describe breakdowns. Not surprisingly, results indicated that children with SLI:PD were more difficult to understand than peers because of phonological errors and reduced intelligibility, supporting long-held beliefs about the functional impact of phonological impairments. Less predictable, however, was the finding that when children with SLI:PD were intelligible, mothers had more difficulty understanding them because of ambiguous utterances and underspecified pronouns, or because of semantically inappropriate or inaccurate information. Implications are discussed, and breakdown descriptions are presented as a useful supplement to current assessment methods and intervention planning.

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Analysis of children’s breakdowns offers a rich data source, potentially revealing patterns of weakness in children’s communication ability. The purpose of the present study was to present a fine-grained instrument, the Breakdown Coding System (BCS; Yont, 1998), for measuring conversational breakdowns in preschoolers. The BCS was applied to language samples collected from five typically developing children (ages 3;11–4;2 years) during naturalistic interactions with familiar caregivers. Results indicated that the BCS was a useful tool for describing children’s breakdowns. Further support for the BCS was seen in the high interobserver reliability for identifying (kappa = .8834) and describing (kappa = .9170) breakdowns and in its usefulness for profiling individual patterns of breakdown types across children. This study is an important first step in developing a valid and useful measure for clinical analysis of breakdowns in young children’s conversational samples.