This paper focuses on the oral referential communication skills of hearing-impaired (HI) children. A task based on that used with language impaired children by Leinonen and Letts (1997) was used to assess the speaking and listening skills of 20 HI children (mean age=10;2 years; mean better ear average hearing loss=88.85 dBHL). Their performance was then compared to that of a group of younger normally hearing (NH) children (mean age=6;9 years). The findings were suggestive of a developmental lag in speaking and listening skills in some of the HI group. In addition, significant negative correlations were found between measures of listener performance and scores on the Test for Reception of Grammar (Bishop, 1989), which suggested that the detection and evaluation stages of Ackerman's (1983) model of message disambiguation might be related to linguistic competence. Differential performances within the HI group, and between the HI and NH groups, and the utility of the referential communication task for teachers, clinicians and researchers are discussed. (Contains 4 tables.)