Clinical observation of children who exhibit both oral and written language disabilities has suggested that there may be parallels in their error patterns in speaking, reading, and writing that merit further investigation. The similarities are apparent in the problems these children have in many aspects of linguistic function in word retrieval, morphology, phonology, and syntax. Thus, these children substitute "potato" for tomato in speaking, reading, and writing. They omit grammatical tense or plural markers when speaking and do the same when reading and writing. They order the sounds incorrectly when speaking certain words and also when reading and writing them. The word order they use is often faulty across these tasks. Functor words are used incorrectly whether they are spoken, read, or written. Similar observations have been made by other investigators who have noted that oral language deficits are often reflected in the written language behavior of language disabled children (Cicci, 1980). However, the nature of such a relationship has yet to be systematically investigated. This study is the initial step in such an investigation. It proposes to analyze the picture naming errors made by language disabled children and to examine the relationship of these errors to their performance on written language tasks. Picture naming was selected as the stimulus material since research with other populations (Denckla and Rudel, 1976; Goodglass, 1980; Jansky and deHirsch, 1972; Katz, 1982; Wolf, 1981) has found it to be an informative starting point. Because the field is relatively uncharted, it was first necessary to determine whether a naming problem indeed existed in these children. It