Two experiments were undertaken to examine the performance of language-impaired children on auditory identification and sequencing tasks which employed different stimuli. The purpose of Experiment I was to determine if introduction of linguistic stimuli (words) into tasks using nonlinguistic stimuli (complex tones) would change subjects' performance. Experiment II was designed to measure differences in response when words and tones were presented separately. Responses to utterances of increasing length (up to four words) were also measured. Results indicated that some children performed significantly better when words were used as stimuli. No child responded better when tones were used as stimuli and there were no significant differences between utterances of different length. Based on these results and on the related literature, considerations for choice of stimuli for intervention with language-impaired children are discussed.