A review of the research on developing children's referential communication ability reveals two approaches: the role-taking approach and the task-analytic approach. In the role-taking approach, researchers attempt to improve children's communication accuracy by training them to be more sensitive to listener needs. In the task-analytic approach, researchers teach specific skills thought to be relevant to the performance of various communication tasks. Efforts to improve children's communication performance by role-taking training have had mixed results. Results from task-analytic training research that focused on teaching children to engage in comparison activity show that the training was effective in improving children's performance and in maintaining these changes over time but that the training did not generalize to other tasks. Researchers should begin to find ways of integrating the task-analytic and role taking approaches in their studies of children's referential communication ability. (Author/FL)