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ABSTRACT I The study summarized in this paper dea with the grammatical analysis of the spontaneous speech of approxi ately 150 children who are lassified as mentally disabled; educable (I.Q. range 50-80). The performance of these mentally disadvantaged' children is compared with the performance of 200 normally developing children by using a clinical procedure for estimating syntactic development in children's spontaneous speech. The analytical procedure followed is that'presented in Laura Lee's Developmental Sentence Analysis " (1974). At the present time the knowledge concerning dysfunctions of auditory language is based primarily on data from adults who have acquired language and subsequently lost a portion of it. Most of the literature,speculates that mentally disabled children undergo a ',delayed, ' language development and have,a linguistic system that corresponds to younger normal children. Th