Telephone interviews designed to elicit open-ended responses from disadvantaged kindergarten children were taped, analyzed, and scored to test the reliability of this interview technique in obtaining representative speech samples. To determine the effect of familiarity with telephones, one group of 12 children was provided with telephones in the classroom immediately following an initial interview; another group of 13 was given telephones following a second interview 3 months later; and a third group of eight children was interviewed once but given no additional exposure to the telephone. Finally, all three groups were interviewed at the end of an 8-month period. Results indicated that the telephone interview is a reliable technique for recording representative speech samples from young children and has application to longitudinal studies in which changes in verbal behavior can be analyzed in terms of vocabulary level, language structure, and articulation. No significant differences were found in a comparison of the three groups, suggesting that exposure to telephones in the classroom did not strongly influence the child's performance in the telephone interview. That this "exposure" to the telephone was essentially unstructured and that the children in the study were similar to each other should be considered. (DL)