Children with both a language impairment and a learning disabilityare at risk for poor social competence. Yet the processes that placethese children at risk remain unclear. Adevelopmental–organizational perspective was used to exploreprocesses underlying risk for poor social competence among languagelearning disabled children. To this end, the relative influences oflanguage learning disability and social discourse skills on socialcompetence were examined in 50 language learning disabled (LLD) and 50control (non-LLD) children aged 8–12 years. Findings indicatedthat social discourse skills mediated the relation between LLD statusand children's social competence. Specifically, a domain ofsocial discourse, figurative language, was the strongest mediator ofthe effect of LLD status on social competence. Additionally,differences were confirmed between the LLD and non-LLD group in twodomains of social discourse, recreating sentences and figurativelanguage, as well as social competence. Two other domains of socialdiscourse, understanding ambiguous sentences and making inferences,did not discriminate the groups. The findings emphasize the importanceof analyzing interrelations among domains to identify critical factorsrelated to developmental outcomes.