Four samples of language-impaired and control children (N=233, ages from 4 to 14) participated in seven experiments to determine the specific conditions under which retrieval deficits play a role in language-impaired children's word finding problems. Experiments 1-5 dealt with recall, retrieval, and similarity judgments of words presented individually or in lists of words. Experiments 6 and 7 were concerned with naming of pictures and recall of words presented in larger and more meaningful linguistic contexts. Results provided little support for a retrieval deficit interpretation of the language-impaired children's poorer performance in the experiments. The language-impaired children recalled fewer words, and both named pictures and judged picture names more slowly than their same-age peers. However, like their peers, these children used item typicality, as well as superordinate category, semantic-syntactic, and textual information to guide retrieval. Results suggested limits in "elaboration" skills of the impaired children. Words, being less well known by language-impaired children, may be represented in a less elaborate form in semantic memory and it is this unelaborate representation of words that make accessing words difficult for language-impaired children. The findings suggest the utility of intervention approaches that provide children with a richer base of information about a word's meaning, use, and syntactic privileges of occurrence, and suggest caution in the use of approaches that teach children strategies for retrieval without providing information about the words to be retrieved. (Author/DB)