Irregularities in oral fluency, or "disfluencies," are common in the speech habits of both children and adults. Disfluencies can take the form of hesitations, revisions, repetitions, or interjections. Most disfluenceies do not occur at random, but are directly linked to other factors such as verbal planning--the combination of decisions a speaker must make during the communication process--word choice, grammatical structure, and the level of abstraction, or "ideation level," whereby statements are classified as a simple enumeration of objects, a verbalized description of objects, or an interpretive conclusion. Forty preschool children were asked to describe what they saw in a series of photographs, and their responses were analyzed on ideation levels. Results indicated that verbal planning is directly related to the frequency of speech disfluencies and that more disfluencies occurred at the descriptive level than at the interpretive level. Differences at the enumerative level were not significant. Differences between males and females or middle class and lower class children were not significant, although middle class males produced more disfluencies than middle class females. (RN)