The study was designed to identify the patterns, if any, that language impaired children use when employing stress in spontaneous speech. Five preschool boys with a variety of language problems involving pragmatics, syntax, semantics, and/or phonology were identified as subjects. Both had received language therapy within the last 5 years and, during this study, continued to receive speech therapy at least two times per week. Two-word utterances in spontaneous language samples were analyzed to determine which of the two words was more stressed (more perceptually prominent). The placement of the stressed word was then classified in three ways: (1) into one of 13 semantic categories; (2) by whether or not it added information not previously available in an interchange; and (3) by whether it was the first or second word of the utterance. When compared to previous research on normally developing children, findings indicated that both language impaired and normal language children have preferences regarding the placement of stress. However, language impaired subjects stressed different semantic categories. The position of the stressed word in the utterance appeared to extract the strongest influence on stress placement. The word order preference may occur because language disordered children at this age have not yet achieved linguistic control of stress. (CL)