The study examined whether an animal naming task would discriminate between 286 normal students (grades K-9) and 123 language disordered students (5-16 years old). The task was of a free and controlled association type for identifying word retrieval problems. Each subject (S) was administered the task individually in the school or clinic setting. The mean number of responses were computed across grades for both groups. Steady increments in scores were found for both groups through the fifth grade. Normal language Ss produced more animal names than their language disordered grademates in 8 of the 10 grades, although differences were not significant at any grade level. It is concluded that three aspects of lexical accessibility need to be explored to gain insight into the results: word frequency, codability, and age of acquisition. (CL)