A study compared learning disabled (LD) adolescents with oral expressive problems to non-learning-disabled (NLD) adolescents on a formal operations task, with emphasis on a comparison between non-verbal performance and verbal explanations of the task. This paper reports part of the study, a comparison of two high school freshman subjects. The task was to insert 10 rods in a board and to determine why some of the rods bent more easily than others. Each subject participated in the task with the experimenter and then was asked to explain the task to a person who had not been present for the task. While both subjects met the non-verbal criteria of the task, major differences appeared in the verbal behavior. The NLD subject used connectives; the LD subject either used no connectives or used only "and" and "then." With regard to the choice of content, the NLD subject produced a text consistent with an explanatory format, while the LD subject produced a narrative text. Because the LD subject was able to generalize in the non-verbal situation, it could be concluded that the problem lies in the expression of generalizations and a lack of text-structuring devices, not in the lack of the ability to generalize nor in the lack of formal-operations skills. (AMH)